March 10th Seminar

MARCH 10TH 2021

15:00 PM (CET) / Online Event

We are delighted to announce our following event. On March 10th, RedEx will be hosting this interesting virtual seminar, with the participation of Javier G. Polavieja, who will be presenting their experimental work about hiring discrimination: the author wonders whether the Euro debt crisis intensified negative stereotypes about Southern Europeans’ productivity across other European countries.

 

Keep an eye on this page and Twitter, we will be posting the link soon.

 

Hope to see you there!

 

 

Abstract

In the aftermath of recession and the Euro debt crisis, negative stereotypes about Southern Europeans have been (re)activated across Northern European countries. Because these stereotypes make explicit reference to productivity-relevant traits, they have the potential to influence employers’ hiring decisions. Using a sub-sample of data from the GEMM study, we investigate the responses of over 3,000 firms based in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, to identical (fictitious) young applicants born to Greek, Spanish and Italian parents. We find significant -and often severe- levels of hiring discrimination against applicants of Southern European descent in Norway and the Netherlands but not in Germany. Our analysis further suggests employers’ preferences for applicants with ‘native’ (non-migrant) heritage -over everybody else- is the driving force of discrimination in Norway, while discrimination in the Netherlands seems driven by a mechanism of targeted rejection of Greek and Spanish (but not Italian) descendants, which appears consistent with existing negative stereotypes. We argue differences in discrimination estimates and discrimination types across countries could respond to the combination of specific migration histories, the degree of regulation over hiring procedures, and the specific dynamics of negative stereotyping unleashed by the Euro debt crisis.

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