Debunking Frakes and Gruber’s New Study on Racial Concordance

The claim that patients have better outcomes when they are treated by a doctor of the same race is the key to efforts to maintain racial preferences in medical education and hiring. However, the evidence does not support the alleged benefits of “racial concordance,” as it is called in the research literature. Systematic reviews of studies on the effects of racial concordance do not show better outcomes for patients treated by doctors of the same race. Even a highly touted study cited by a Supreme Court justice that purported to prove the benefits of racial concordance was later revealed to be marred by researcher misconduct and a Harvard economist was unable to replicate the results when adding an obvious statistical control.

Advocates for race-based preferences in medical education and hiring have grown desperate in their efforts to maintain racial preferences in the face of court decisions and legislation that seek to eliminate them. A new study in The Review of Economic Studies offers to rescue them, but, as this analysis will show, it turns out to be no more credible than past claims. There continues to be no scientific basis for maintaining racial preferences in medical education and hiring.

Continue reading the full report below.