Do Employers Use Unemployment as a Sorting Criterion When Hiring? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Stefan Eriksson, Dan-Olof Rooth. Social Science Research Network, 2014

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we use unique data from a field experiment in the Swedish labor market to investigate how past and contemporary unemployment affect a young worker's probability of being invited to a job interview. In contrast to studies using registry/survey data, we have complete control over the information available to the employers and there is no scope for unobserved heterogeneity. We find no evidence that recruiting employers use information about past unemployment to sort workers, but some evidence that they use contemporary unemployment to sort workers. The fact that employers do not seem to use past unemployment as a sorting criterion suggests that the scarring effects of unemployment may not be as severe as has been indicated by previous studies.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6073e6121b7d114d33e69a3d9e96823034fb35d

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Citations in the corpus

Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments Since 2005 (2017, methodology): “So, correspondence experiments included to assess the causal effect of, e.g., other cv characteristics such as juvenile delinquency, student employment and (former) unemployment spells were not included (Baert & Verhofstadt, 2015; Baert et al., 2016d; Kroft et al., 2013; Eriksson & Rooth, 2014).”
Field Experiments on Discrimination (2016, background): “In Sweden, Eriksson and Rooth (2014) randomly assigned various characteristics (contemporary unemployment, past unemployment immediately after graduation, past unemployment between jobs, work experience, and number of employers). Long-term unemployment did not harm job candidates’ chances, as long a”
College Major, Internship Experience, and Employment Opportunities: Estimates from a Résumé Audit (2016, background): “…receives a request for an interview from a prospective employer, which follows other researchers who use the résumé-audit framework (Baert et al. 2014; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Carlsson and Rooth 2007; Eriksson and Rooth 2014; Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo 2013; Lahey 2008; Oreopoulos 2011).”
The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study (2014, unknown): “Time to degree has lengthened and completion rates have declined as students receive fewer public resources per capita and face difficulty enrolling in courses that are necessary for graduation (Barr and Turner 2013; Bound, Lovenheim and Turner 2012; Deming, Goldin and Katz 2013; Pearson Foundation ”