CefES Webinar "Ethnic Discrimination and Unemployment: Evidence from Online Recruitment"

Dominik Hangartner (ETH, Zurich) presents his latest paper "Ethnic Discrimination and Unemployment: Evidence from Online Recruitment"

Registration

Registration is ongoing - details on the participation will be sent by email to registered participants.

Further information

This conference is co-organised by the Center for European Studies (CefES) of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and the JRC.

For more information, visit the webinar page or email cefes@unimib.it

This paper analyzes the relationship between discrimination and unemployment of minority jobseekers. We virtually peer over recruiters shoulders while they make actual hiring decisions by tracking their clicks on the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service. We then match the jobseekers screened by recruiters to their entries in the Swiss unemployment register. These data allow us to estimate contact penalties for detailed ethnic groups and to relate these penalties to jobseekers' search outcomes. We find that European and non-European jobseekers face lower contact rates than equally qualified "native'' Swiss jobseekers. These differences become more pronounced when recruiters can choose from many (native) candidates. Fewer contacts on the platform matter because contacts increase job finding rates. Moreover, the estimated discrimination coefficients are highly predictive of differences in unemployment duration between detailed ethnic groups conditional on all other observable characteristics. Estimating the full distribution of employers' discrimination coefficients, we find that almost a third of recruiters discriminate statistically significantly against non-Europeans. Together, these results suggest that ethnic discrimination is prevalent among recruiters and prolongs minorities' unemployment, particularly in slack labor markets.

Venue

online, EU