IS YOUR name holding you back from a life of riches? It sounds like something out of a terrible infomercial, but a recent paper* suggests that changing your name really could improve your labour-market chances. The authors focus on the economic impact of name Americanisation for migrants in the 1930s, with surprising results. Economists—most famously the Freakonomics duo, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner—have long worried that having the “wrong” name could set you back in the labour market. A number of studies show that having an “ethnic-sounding” name tends to disadvantage job applicants (though others suggest that names matter little).

Waves of migrants to America did not need economists to tell them that their name could be a disadvantage. Many changed their names to fit in. Almost a third of naturalising immigrants abandoned their first names by 1930 and acquired popular American names such as William, John or Charles. What was the impact? The authors draw on a sample of 3,400 male migrants who naturalised in New York in 1930. A large fraction of the sample was born in Italy, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and other countries with similarly distinctive anthroponomy. Over half of Russian migrants Americanised their names; only 4% of Irish migrants did so. The authors came up with an index to show how American different names were: that allowed them to quantify a shift from a non-American to an American name.

There were two steps to the naturalisation process. Migrants had to first file a declaration of intention. The second step involved filing a petition for admission to citizenship about five years following the initial declaration. The authors can therefore observe migrants’ characteristics at two different points in time.

The economists do not have direct data for earnings. But the naturalisation papers record migrants' occupations. So the authors rely on another measure of earning potential that assigns scores to each occupation. A higher occupational score suggests a higher income. The authors find that changing from a purely foreign name to a very common American name is associated with a 14% hike in earnings.**

There is also the problem of reverse causality. It is quite possible that richer migrants were more inclined to Americanise their name. (They might, for example, live in a richer area with fewer migrants, which might incentivise them to change their name to fit in). So, to establish a causal link from name-changing to wage-boosting—and here’s my favourite part of the paper—the authors turn to Scrabble. They calculate the Scrabble score for the name of each arriving migrant (the score of all the letters in the name) and show that individuals who decided to Americanise had higher Scrabble points. That finding soothes worries about reverse causality: it suggests that it was not the wealthier people that changed their names, but those with unusual names.

What sorts of people were most likely to Americanise their name? The most boring explanation is one concerning “imperfect information”: only some migrants realised the benefit of Americanisation. But the authors find little evidence for that. Instead, they show that migrants facing the greatest barriers to occupational mobility were most likely to Americanise and reaped the highest returns from doing so. People who came from more "exotic" countries, or who could not migrate to better jobs, benefited more from Americanisation than better-off migrants. These migrants had to jettison their individual identity for labour-market success.

* Biavaschi, C., Giulietti, C., & Siddique, Z. (2013). The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization (No. 7725). IZA Discussion Paper.

** A quibble with the result would be the r-squared of the regression, which is very low.