Does the name on a CV change who gets a callback?
✓ Numbers check out
Counts as holding up
The code and data produced the same result. That doesn't prove the study's method is right.
The study asked whether putting a white-sounding or Black-sounding name on a CV changes the chance of a job callback, and an independent rebuild of the numbers found callbacks came at a ratio of 1.50 to 1, matching the paper.
The experiment mailed about 5,000 fictitious CVs to real job advertisements in Boston and Chicago, randomly assigning names that sound white or Black. Because the names were assigned at random, any difference in callback rates can be tied to the name itself rather than to CV quality. The callback ratio has been widely cited as evidence of hiring discrimination, which is why checking it matters.
A small independent program was run on a public copy of the experiment's data, computing the ratio of callbacks for white-sounding names to Black-sounding names. It produced 1.4968, matching the published 1.50, though the public data holds slightly fewer CVs than the working paper's table. Because the rebuild is not the authors' own code, this only confirms the same number comes from the same data; it does not show the result holds today, in other places, or that names signal race rather than class.
The text was written by a private AI model on NEAR AI (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash). The verdict and numbers come straight from the blockchain, and the AI can't change them.
- What the paper said
- All sent resumes: 10.06%, 6.70%, ratio 1.50. Table 1, first row, of the working paper (NBER 9873)
- What we got
- 1.4968
- Whose code ran
- Independent rebuild
- How well known
- Cited by 5,025 studies
- What forecasters thought
- Nobody forecast this one. We posted it with the result already known, to show how a famous paper looks.
- Proof
- Read the receipt or see claim 29
What we didn't check
- Whether the sample was fair or large enough.
- Whether test data leaked into training or tuning.
- Whether the result holds on new data.
- Whether the study's method was the right one for its question.
- Whether the same gap exists today, or outside Boston and Chicago in 2001 and 2002.
- Whether the names signal only race, and not also class.
Community notes
Notes are people's own words, kept on the blockchain. They never change a verdict, and the Lab's AI never reads them. Posting costs a little NEAR for storage, and what isn't used comes back.