Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation

Adrian Blattner

Main content start

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Winter 2024

Contact on the Job - An Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination in Brazil


In Brazil, existing evidence points to significant discrimination based on skin color and political affiliation in the labor market. We conduct a field experiment with J-PAL Brazi, in which we randomize individuals into contact with a stranger of a different race and political affiliation as part of a job training. We test the effect of co-worker interactions on discrimination and evaluate two competing questions to inform policy: is the effect driven by updating about the outgroups performance, i.e. statistical discrimination? Alternatively, does the effect of contact require an opportunity to learn about other 'social' characteristics of the outgroup?


Adrian Blattner, Department of Economics

headshot of Adrian Blattner

Adrian Blattner is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Stanford. His research incorporates experimental and econometric methods to study determinants and policies related to political polarization, gender inequality, and inequities in access to secondary education. Adrian is a Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar and recipient of the ERP Fellowship by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. Prior to Stanford, Adrian was a lead research analyst at the World Bank and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds a MA in Economics from Stanford and a BSc in Politics and Economics from the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Return to past recipients of graduate student research funding