[We’re pleased to welcome Stijn Baert of Ghent University. Stijn published an article in ILR Review entitled “Is There Less Discrimination in Occupations Where Recruitment Is Difficult?,” with co-authors Bart Cockx, Niels Gheyle, and Cora Vandamme.]
Do employers discriminate less when vacancies are difficult to fill? Theory says yes. Lower arrival rates of employees at vacancies increase the cost of discriminating because the foregone output when a minority worker is turned away is higher in that case. In this study, we are the first to test this theoretical relationship between hiring discrimination and labor
market tightness in an empirical way. To this end, we sent out fictitious job applications of school-leavers, randomly assigned to individuals with a native- and a Turkish-sounding name, to vacancies for jobs requiring no work experience in Belgium. We found indeed that, compared to natives, candidates with a Turkish-sounding name are equally often invited to a job interview if they apply for occupations for which vacancies are difficult to fill; but, they have to send twice as many applications for occupations for which labor market tightness is low.
The abstract for the paper:
The authors empirically test the cross-sectional relationship between hiring discrimination and labor market tightness at the level of the occupation. To this end, they conduct a correspondence test in the youth labor market. In line with theoretical expectations, results show that, compared to natives, candidates with a foreign-sounding name are equally often invited to a job interview if they apply for occupations for which vacancies are difficult to fill; but, they have to send out twice as many applications for occupations for which labor market tightness is low. Findings are robust to various sensitivity checks.
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