Essays on Discrimination in Hiring

Sammanfattning: This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on discrimination in hiring.Essay I (co-authored with Dan-Olof Rooth) present evidence of ethnic discrimination in the recruitment process by sending fictitious applications to real job openings. Applications with identical skills were randomly assigned Middle Eastern or Swedish-sounding names and applications with a Swedish name receive fifty percent more callbacks for an interview. We extend previous analyses by adding register and interview information on firms/recruiters to the experimental data. We find that male recruiters and workplaces with fewer than twenty employees less often call applications with a Middle Eastern name for an interview.Essay II extends previous field experiments that study ethnic discrimination in the labour market by comparing discrimination of first and second generation immigrants from the same ethnic group. Qualitatively identical resumes, belonging to first and second generation immigrants from the Middle East, were sent to employers in Sweden that had advertised for labour. The findings suggest, somewhat unexpectedly, that first and second generation immigrants have essentially the same probability of being invited to a job interview, which in turn is significantly lower than the probability of invitation to interview for natives. Accordingly, the factor leading to discrimination in employers responses appears to be ethnicity per se and not an applicant’s country of birth, foreign mother-tongue, and foreign education.Essay III (co-authored with Dan-Olof Rooth) utilizes the extensive media coverage that occurred when the data collection of essay I and II were only halfway finished. This informed the employers that their hiring practices were being monitored by such situation testing. These unique events and the data from the situation tests are utilized to perform a difference-in-differences analysis of whether discrimination decreased after the media coverage. The results reveal no sign that employers changed their hiring practices after they became aware of the risk of being included in such a situation test. The policy implication of this relates to the fact that EU countries vary in the extent to which they allow situation test results to constitute evidence of ethnic discrimination in court. Our results suggest that the detection risk alone is not sufficient, but must be combined with some penalty to become effective, if authorities wish to use situation testing as a discrimination prevention strategy.Essay IV studies whether sex discrimination is the cause of sex segregation in the Swedish labor market. The correspondence testing (CT) method was used, which entails two qualitatively identical applications, one with a female name and one with a male name, being sent to employers advertising for labor. The results show that, on average, females have a somewhat higher callback rate to interview in female-dominated occupations, while in male-dominated occupations there is no evidence of any difference. This suggests that the bulk of the sex segregation prevailing in the Swedish labor market cannot be explained by discrimination in hiring. Instead, the explanation is likely to be found on the supply side.