Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro

Abstract A large scholarship documents discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities in institutional settings such as labour housing markets Europe. We know less, however, about informal unstructured everyday encounters. To address this gap, we report results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance of an unobtrusive yet important measure multiethnic European metropolis. In addition to varying confederates’ migration background race, also vary signals status (business versus casual attire) order shed light on mechanisms underlying discriminatory patterns. find that natives are averse contact with Nigerian confederates, but do not discriminate Chinese confederates. Furthermore, manipulating attire has little effect natives’ behaviour. Overall, our highlight burdens borne particularly by individuals African descent commonplace, ‘street-level’