Do ethnicity and sex of employers affect applicants’ job interest? An experimental exploration

Mark Granberg (), Niklas Ottosson () and Ali Ahmed ()
Additional contact information
Mark Granberg: Linköping University
Niklas Ottosson: Linköping University
Ali Ahmed: Linköping University

Journal for Labour Market Research, 2020, vol. 54, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Starting a business is one way out of unemployment for many people. Having a small pool of job applicants may, however, affect the quality of manpower available to employers. This paper reports the results of an experimental study that examined whether job-seekers discriminate against prospective employers based on those employers’ ethnicity and sex. We conducted an experiment with 889 university students, where we presented 10 hypothetical job vacancies in the restaurant sector to the participants. We then asked participants to state their willingness to apply to each job. The ethnicity and sex of the employers were conveyed through employers’ names by using typical male and female Arabic- and Swedish-sounding names. Overall, our results provided no evidence of ethnic or sex discrimination by job-seekers against employers.

Keywords: Discrimination; Job search; Labor demand; Labor supply; Workers; Employers; J71; J29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s12651-020-00281-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jlabrs:v:54:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1186_s12651-020-00281-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12651

DOI: 10.1186/s12651-020-00281-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal for Labour Market Research is currently edited by Joachim Möller

More articles in Journal for Labour Market Research from Springer, Institute for Employment Research/ Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().