published in: Emperical Economics, 2017, 53, 803 - 826
We study the recruitment behavior of Swedish employers using data from a stated choice experiment. In the experiment, the employers are first asked to describe an employee who recently and voluntarily left the firm, and then to choose between two hypothetical applicants to invite to a job interview or to hire as a replacement for their previous employee. The two applicants differ with respect to characteristics such as gender, age, education, experience, ethnicity, religious beliefs, family situation, weight, and health. Our results show that employers discriminate against applicants who are old, non-European, Muslim, Jewish, obese, have several children, or have a history of sickness absence. Moreover, increasing the firms' cost of uncertainty in hiring – through more firm co-payment in the sickness benefit system – may reduce hiring, but does not affect the degree of discrimination. Also, there are only small differences in the degree of discrimination between different types of recruiters and firms. Overall, our results suggest that the discrimination, at least partially, should reflect statistical discrimination.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.