Hiring Dynamics
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Florence Neymotin, Nova Southeastern University
Employer Preferences for Local vs. Non-Local Workers: A Resume Audit
Abstract
There is significant and persistent heterogeneity in unemployment rates and labor earnings across labor markets in the US, contributing to overall economic inequality. Developments since the 1990s indicate that migration has declined even as job posting websites have expanded access to and awareness of employment opportunities beyond a worker's location of origin. This project explores the importance of workers' geographic location when applying to online job postings to proxy for access to job opportunities for job seekers who are local and non-local. We examine how job applicant characteristics, specifically a worker's current location, implied gender, and implied career stage/age affect employer contact/callback rates across several occupations and cities in the USA. Methodologically, this study conducts a resume correspondence experiment, randomly assigning the resumes of fictitious candidates with different geographical locations to employers who are actively seeking employees to determine if employers' have a location preference for their new hires. Preliminary results of this ongoing experiment indicate employers are attentive to workers' location and prefer local applicants. We theoretically address potential mechanisms for why employers may prefer local applicants and engage in place-based discrimination. Understanding if sufficient labor market opportunities exist for workers searching for work outside of their geographic labor market of origin is relevant to both academic and policy debates which consider the roles of worker migration and place based-economic development in addressing spatial inequality/inequities.UI Benefit Generosity and Labor Supply from 2002-2020: Evidence from California UI Records
Abstract
This paper provides estimates of the effect of unemployment insurance benefits on labor supply outcomes over the business cycle using 20 years of administrative claims, earnings, and employer data from California. A regression kink design exploiting nonlinear benefit schedules provides experimental estimates of behavioral labor supply responses throughout the unemployment spell that are comparable over time. For a given unemployment duration, the behavioral effect of UI benefit levels on labor supply is unchanged over the business cycle from 2002 to 2019. However, due to increased coverage from extensions in benefit durations , the duration elasticity of UI benefits rises during recessions. The behavioral effect during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is substantially lower at all weeks of the unemployment spell.Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Examining Barriers to Job Placement in Summer Youth Employment Programs
Abstract
Using lotteries from oversubscribed programs, prior research shows Summer Youth Employment Programs have significant impacts on youth outcomes including crime reduction, high school graduation, employment and wages. But what if jobs cannot be allocated using simple random assignment due to heterogeneous preferences from employers and youth participants? During summer 2022, we obtained daily data snapshots from the City of Boston hiring platform to match youth to summer jobs, providing a unique glimpse into youth labor market dynamics and the job matching process within a workforce development program. Using this novel data set, we explore youth job application behavior, employer selection behavior, and identify barriers at the intersection that create disparities. We find that roughly one-third of youth fail to complete the application process and among those that apply to at least one job, applicants are less likely to be Hispanic compared to the population of Boston youth aged 14-17 years. Among youth with a valid job application, approximately half are selected by an employer and employers are nearly twice as likely to select white youth relative to the percentage of whites in the overall pool of applicants. This disparity persisted even when controlling for previous participation in the program and having uploaded a resume as a signal of interest. Implementing a job matching algorithm stratified by race and ethnicity eliminates these disparities completely. Our results indicate that despite aiming to reduce inequality, summer jobs programs that face heterogeneity on both sides of the job matching process are likely to perpetuate inequities found in the labor market. In the absence of a simple random selection mechanism, instituting some kind of 50-50 rule with half of the program slots filled by employer selection and the remaining half filled by a lottery could be a feasible solution to improve both equity and efficiency.Discussant(s)
Xiaozhou Ding
,
Dickinson College
Brad Hershbein
,
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
JEL Classifications
- J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor
- J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers