Dominik Hangartner and Michael Siegenthaler

Monitoring Ethnic and Immigrant Discrimination in Hiring Decisions in Times of Crisis

The aim of the project is to analyze hiring discrimination faced by ethnic and immigrant minorities in Switzerland before, during, and after the COVID-19 crisis. The project addresses the following questions: How does ethnic discrimination interact with gender or legal status? Did the COVID-19 crisis moderate or amplify disparities in hiring? How do labor market tightness and immigration bans interact with ethnicity- and gender-based discrimination?

The empirical analyses of these questions are based on high-frequency panel data from the Swiss-government affiliated employment website ‘Job-Room.’ Since 2018, we track recruiter search behavior on this platform, record the jobseeker profiles viewed by recruiters, and their decision whether to contact a jobseeker for an interview. We use supervised machine learning methods to control for all jobseeker characteristics that are predictive of contact or ethnicity. Therefore, the click data allow us to identify the causal effect of ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions for detailed ethnic groups, and to continuously monitor changes in discrimination from 2018 until the end of Phase III of the NCCR.

In a separate analysis, we leverage the abolition of the seasonal workers permit in Switzerland to analyze how improving the legal status of a precarized group of migrant workers affects wage and employment discrimination by employers. We use merged administrative data to estimate the causal effects of the seasonal worker permit, leveraging its staggered abolition across nationalities.

Intermediate Scientific Poster 2024 (PDF)

Project-related scientific publications Select publication   Schüpbach, Kristina Zwischen Marktmacht und Arbeitsrechten: Die Auswirkungen des Saisonnierstatuts für die Löhne von Migrant:innen 2023