Employer Discrimination and the Immutability of Ethnic 1 Hierarchies: A Field Experiment Kåre Vernby Associate Professor Department of Political Science Stockholm University
[email protected] Rafaela Dancygier Associate Professor Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University
[email protected] June 27, 2018 Version 1.1 Abstract How pervasive is labor market discrimination against immigrants and what options do policymakers and migrants have to reduce it? To answer these questions, we conducted a field experiment on employer discrimination in Sweden. Going beyond existing work, we test for a large range of applicant characteristics using a factorial design. We examine whether migrants can affect their employment chances – by adopting citizenship, acquiring work experience, or signaling religious practice – or whether fixed traits such as country of birth or gender are more consequential. We find no evidence that immigrants can do much to reduce discrimination. Rather, ethnic hierarchies are critical: callback rates decline precipitously with the degree of ethno-cultural distance, leaving Iraqis and Somalis, especially if they are male, with much reduced employment chances. These findings highlight that immigrants have few tools at their disposal to escape ethnic penalties and that efforts to reduce discrimination must address employer prejudice. 1 We thank Sofia Härd, Erik Antonsson and Martina Zetterqvist for valuable research assistance and participants at seminars at the American Political Science Association, Stanford University and Uppsala University as well as Adrián Lucardi, Mattias Engdahl, Stefan Eriksson, Dominik Hangartner and Giuseppe Pietrantuono for helpful comments. This project is funded by the Institute for Evaluation of Labor Market and Education Policy (IFAU) and was approved by the Regional Ethics Approval Board (ref.