What's in a Name?

38 Pages Posted: 27 Apr 2004

See all articles by Saku Aura

Saku Aura

University of Missouri at Columbia - Department of Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

Gregory D. Hess

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

Date Written: May 2004

Abstract

Plenty. This paper analyzes two broad questions: Does your first name matter? And how did you get your first name anyway? Using data from the National Opinion Research Centers (NORC's) General Social Survey, including access to respondents first names from the 1994 and 2002 surveys, we extract the important "first name features" (FNF), e.g. popularity, number of syllables, phonetic features, Scrabble score, "blackness" (i.e. the fraction of people with that name who are black), etc ... We then explore whether these first name features are useful explanatory factors of a respondent's exogenous background factors (sex, race, parents' education, etc...) and lifetime outcomes (e.g. financial status, occupational prestige, perceived social class, education, happiness, and whether they became a parent before 25). We find that first name features on their own do have significant predictive power for a number of these lifetime outcomes, even after controlling for a myriad of exogenous background factors. We find evidence that first name features are independent predictors of lifetime outcomes that are likely related to labor productivity such as education, happiness and early fertility. Importantly, however, we also find evidence based on the differential impacts of gender and race on the blackness of a name and its popularity that suggest that discrimination may also be a factor.

Keywords: Names, identity, discrimination

JEL Classification: D1, J1, J7

Suggested Citation

Aura, Saku and Hess, Gregory D., What's in a Name? (May 2004). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=536163 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.536163

Saku Aura

University of Missouri at Columbia - Department of Economics ( email )

118 Professional Building
Columbia, MO 65211
United States

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

Gregory D. Hess (Contact Author)

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://www.CESifo.de

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
874
Abstract Views
5,274
Rank
59,294
PlumX Metrics