Seminar “Macroeconomics and Labor Market” on 19 November 2019
We are pleased to invite you to the seminar series on “Macroeconomics and Labor Markets“ organized by the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Macroeconomics, and the Research Departments for Macroeconomic Labour Market Research of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Researchers of both institutions as well as national and international guests are presenting their current work at the intersection of labor and macro economics.
The next seminar will be held on Tuesday, November 19th 2019:
Michael Siegenthaler (ETH, Zürich)
“Monitoring recruiters at work: Ethnic discrimination on an online recruitment platform ”
Place: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Lange Gasse 20, Room 2.429
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Abstract:
Women (compared to men) and ethnic minorities (compared to natives) face inferior labor market outcomes in many economies, but the extent to—and the channels through—which discrimination is responsible for these effects remains unclear. We introduce a new approach to investigating hiring discrimination that combines tracking of recruiters’ search behavior on employment websites and supervised machine learning to control for all job-seeker characteristics that are visible to recruiters. We apply this methodology to the Swiss government-affiliated, online recruitment platform. Based on more than 3 million decisions, we find that, depending on their country of origin, ethnic minorities face 3–19% lower contact rates than otherwise identical natives. These ethnic penalties are larger during the hours just before noon and towards the end of the workday, when recruiters spend less time evaluating each CV. In general, we find that employers spend less time on the profiles of certain ethnic groups, but the economic effect is small. We also find that skills and labor market tightness moderate discrimination: ethnic penalties are larger for job seekers with low employability and limited German skills, and if there is a larger pool of candidates to choose from. Lastly, we find that obtaining a Swiss passport substantially reduces discrimination against immigrant job seekers. Our approach provides a widely applicable, non-intrusive, and cost-efficient tool that researchers and policy-makers can employ to continuously monitor hiring discrimination, and to inform approaches to counter it.