Extended Data Fig. 6: Tests for statistical discrimination.
From: Monitoring hiring discrimination through online recruitment platforms
a, Effects of ethnicity on the contact rate estimated separately for jobseekers with low (n = 332,425 profile views), medium (n = 585,979 profile views) or high (n = 501,506 profile views) unobserved employability. Dots with horizontal lines indicate point estimates with cluster-robust 95% confidence intervals from OLS regression. The construction of the index of unobserved employability exploit that we can observe the age, marital status and pre-unemployment wage of jobseekers. These characteristics are unobserved by recruiters on Job-Room. The construction involves several steps. First, we collapse the data at the jobseeker level and split the sample randomly in a training (50% of the searches) and a test sample (the remaining 50%). Second, we interact the three characteristics with nine occupation dummies (according to the Swiss SBN occupational classification). Third, we regress a dummy variable that a jobseeker leaves unemployment within the first four months after registering at the Swiss public employment service on these interactions, controlling for occupation-period and canton fixed effects. On the basis of these occupation-specific estimates, we predict the likelihood that jobseekers in the test sample leave unemployment within four months. We then assign each of these jobseekers to one of three equally sized groups (high, medium and low unobserved employability). The likelihood that a jobseeker with high unobserved employability leaves unemployment within 4 months is 37%, whereas it is 10% for jobseekers with low unobserved employability. The regressions are based on the test sample. b, Effects of ethnicity on the contact rate by length of the unstructured text field containing information on additional skills of jobseekers (see Supplementary Table 1 for examples). Dots with horizontal lines indicate point estimates of the interaction between length of skill field and ethnicity with cluster-robust 95% confidence intervals from OLS regression (n = 3,251,263 profile views). The reference categories (the hollow dots on the zero line) are Swiss jobseekers who report no additional skills, a skill field with 1 to 10 words and a skill field with more than 10 words, respectively.
