Cultural Assimilation and Ethnic Discrimination : An Audit Study with Schools

In a field experiment, I test whether the cultural assimilation efforts of immigrant families mitigate discriminatory attitudes of schools. To this end, I sent fictitious visit requests to more than 2,500 schools located in the Community of Madrid (Spain). I find that, controlling for family characteristics, Romanian families who gave a Spanish name to their child are 50% less discriminated than those who selected a Romanian name for their offspring. Emails from families whose members have Romanian names are 12% less likely to receive a response than emails from Spanish-name families. I do not find evidence of heterogeneous effects across school, neighborhood, or municipality characteristics. This suggests that the socioeconomic composition and political preferences of the population do not affect the size of discrimination and returns to assimilation efforts