I would like to know how the database of names was built.
That is, how would one qualify a name as "black-sounding" or "white-sounding"? I hope it was not based only on intuition as that may give misleading results.
Is there a public data set somewhere that correlates given names with ethnicity?
Edit: On second thoughts, it might be more interesting to perform similar google search experiments with both intuitive and empirical name/ethnicity pairings and see if the results differ.
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I would like to know how the database of names was built.
That is, how would one qualify a name as "black-sounding" or "white-sounding"? I hope it was not based only on intuition as that may give misleading results. Is there a public data set somewhere that correlates given names with ethnicity?
Edit: On second thoughts, it might be more interesting to perform similar google search experiments with both intuitive and empirical name/ethnicity pairings and see if the results differ.
The paper - http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6822 - explains that the names were taken from Bertrand and Mullainathan's 2003 study looking at racial discrimination and names on resumes - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 - and a study from Freaknomics - http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/FryerLevitt200... . Both studies used actual names given to black and white children in Massachusetts and California.