Hiring discrimination, ethnic origin and employment status
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use the findings of a correspondence testing in order to assess the hiring effects of foreign-origin and employment status in the French construction sector.
Design/methodology/approach
To empirically test these features, the author constructs four applications, each representing a particular profile with respect to ethnic origin and employment status. The author sends 1,204 résumés in reply to 301 job vacancies advertised from mid-April to mid-September 2011 in the Paris area.
Findings
While being employed increases the performance for applicants of foreign origin, this is not the case for native applicants. However, the benefit of being employed does not fully overcome the penalty created by foreign origin. Hence, the study does not allow to affirm that employed applicants of foreign origin are less penalized than unemployed ones.
Originality/value
This paper improves the knowledge of the effects of employment status on employability. The quantification of these effects remains an important issue. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time correspondence testing has been used to measure the influence of ethnic origin on employability, conditional on employment status.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the participants of the 29th Congress of the European Economic Association, the 26th annual Conference of the European Association of Labour Economists and the 2014 Firm Level Analysis of Labour Issues Conference (Louvain la Neuve) for their useful remarks. The author also wishes to thank the EPEE research team (University of Paris-Saclay) which permitted the valorization of this paper and the anonymous IJM reviewer(s).
Citation
Pierné, G. (2018), "Hiring discrimination, ethnic origin and employment status", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 39 No. 1, pp. 152-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-05-2016-0104
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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