Evidence of ethnic discrimination in the Swedish labor market using experimental data☆
Introduction
There are reasons to expect that discriminatory behavior exists among Swedish employers. Longitudinal attitude surveys of the general public show evidence of negative attitudes toward immigrants in general and surveys among potentially discriminated groups also point in this direction (see Lange, 2000, FSI, 2004).1 These studies indicate that discrimination is worst against individuals with a Middle Eastern background. Also, unemployment rates for immigrants born in the Middle East are found to be several times higher than for natives, indicating that ethnic discrimination exists in the recruitment process. Whether this is true is the main question to be answered in this study.
However, ethnic discrimination is just one possible explanation for native-immigrant differences in finding jobs. Another is (to the researcher) unobserved productive characteristics. Since researchers can seldom account for all differences in productive characteristics between groups it is a difficult task to empirically identify the extent of ethnic discrimination in the labor market.
To circumvent this difficulty researchers have relied on using field experiments specifically designed to test for discrimination in recruitment.2 The correspondence testing methodology implies that the researcher sends two equal applications to advertised job openings with the only difference being the name of the applicant; one with a native-sounding name and the other a foreign-sounding name. Hence, this methodology ensures that productive characteristics on the supply side are held constant. Ethnic discrimination is quantified by the difference in the number of callbacks for interview between the two ethnic groups.
Contrary to most previous studies using this methodology we proceed with collecting company and, especially, recruiter information through official registers and by conducting interviews with the recruiters. Hence, while some studies use variation in application information to analyze how discrimination varies across application attributes (see Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), we use the same application attributes for both applicants to analyze which firm/workplace and recruiter characteristics that are correlated with the ethnic difference in the callback rate to interview.3
Our experimental data was collected between May 2005 and February 2006 by sending two applications; one with a Swedish-sounding male name and one with a Middle Eastern-sounding male name, to job openings in twelve different occupations in the Stockholm and Gothenburg labor market areas. In total we replied to 1552 job ads posted at the home-page of the Swedish Employment Agency. It was found that the callback rate of applications with a Swedish-sounding male name was fifty percent higher than for the ones with a Middle Eastern-sounding name. Interestingly, despite the fact that low level occupations have the largest share of immigrant employees we found that the relative callback rate for Swedish-sounding named applications is higher in lower level occupations than in higher level occupations. Further, regression analysis shows that the ethnic difference in callbacks is related to the sex of the recruiter and to the number of employees at the workplace.
The remainder of this paper is outlined as follows. Section 2 presents the methodology used and the design of the experiment. Section 3 describes the collected data. In Section 4 an analysis is performed using register and interview data on which workplace and recruiter characteristics influence the ethnic difference in the probability of being called for an interview. Section 5 concludes.
Section snippets
Experimental design4
The experiment was conducted between May 2005 and February 2006. During this period all employment advertisements in selected occupations found on the webpage of the Swedish employment agency were collected.5 All in all, 3104 applications were sent to 1552 employers. Callbacks for interviews were received via telephone, email or ordinary post. To minimize inconvenience to the employer
Descriptive results
The last row of Table 1 gives the aggregated results of the experiment. From the first column it is evident that the two applications were sent to 1552 different job openings. Since correspondence testing only focuses on the first step of the hiring process, being called for interview, thus neglecting the second step of who actually gets the job, there are four possible interview outcomes: neither invited, both invited, or only the majority or minority individual being invited for an interview.
Empirical analysis
In this section we analyze the ethnic difference in the probability to be invited for interview and which, if any, workplace and recruiter characteristics are associated with this probability difference. First, we analyze the 2878 applications and 1439 firms for which we have data on recruiter and workplace characteristics.17 Second, we condition on that the workplace/recruiter has called at least one applicant
Conclusion
This is the first study relating to Sweden which examines the extent of differential treatment in the hiring process due to ethnicity by means of correspondence testing, an experimental method specifically designed for this purpose. Our aggregated results show that for equivalent applications the interview callback rate is twenty-nine percent when having a Swedish name and twenty percent when having a Middle Eastern name attached to it. This difference is exclusively attributed to the name
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We thank two anonymous referees, Per Johansson, Olof Åslund, participants at seminars in Kalmar, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Växjö University and at the 2006 EALE Conference in Prague for valuable comments. Klara Johansson provided excellent research assistance. A research grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research is gratefully acknowledged. The data used in the article are available from the authors upon request.