Detecting discrimination in the hiring process: evidence from an Internet-based search channel

Stefan Eriksson and Jonas Lagerström ()
Additional contact information
Jonas Lagerström: IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation, Postal: P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

No 2007:19, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation

Abstract: This paper uses data from an Internet-based CV database to investigate how factors which may be used as a basis for discrimination, such as the searchers’ ethnicity, gender, age and employment status, affect the number of contacts they receive from firms. Since we have access to essentially the same information as the firms, we can handle the problems associated with unobserved heterogeneity better than most existing studies of discrimination. We find that, even when we control for all other differences, searchers who have non-Nordic names, are old or unemployed receive significantly fewer contacts. Moreover, we find that this matters for the hiring outcome: Searchers who receive more contacts have a higher probability of actually getting hired.

Keywords: Job search; Unobserved heterogeneity; Discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-lab
Date: 2007-08-25
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2007/wp07-19.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Detecting discrimination in the hiring process: Evidence from an Internet-based search channel (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2007_019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation
Address: Labour Market Policy Evaluation, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Margareta Wicklander ().