What Do Blind Evaluations Reveal? How Discrimination Shapes Representation and Quality

Concealing candidate identities during evaluations ("blinding") is often proposed to combat discrimination, yet its effects on the composition and quality of selected candidates, as well as its underlying mechanisms, remain unclear. I conduct a field experiment at an international academic conference, randomly assigning all 657 submitted papers to two blind and two non-blind reviewers (245 total) and collecting paper quality measures---citations and publication statuses five years later. I find that blinding significantly shrinks gaps in reviewer scores and acceptances by student status and institution rank, with no significant effects by gender. These increases in representation are not at the expense of quality: papers selected under blind review are of comparable quality to those selected non-blind. To understand mechanisms, I run a second field experiment that again implements blind and non-blind review, and elicits reviewer predictions of future submission outcomes. I combine my experiments to estimate a model of reviewer scores that uses blind scores to decompose non-blind disparities into distinct forms of discrimination. I find that the nature of discrimination differs by trait: student score gaps are explained by inaccurate beliefs about paper quality (inaccurate statistical discrimination) and alternative objectives (such as favoring authors whose acceptance benefits others), while institution gaps are attributable to residual drivers of discrimination such as animus.