Intergenerational Mobility in 15 Destination Countries
Joint with Leah Boustan, Matthias F. Jensen, Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome, Alan Manning, Santiago Pérez, Analysia Watley, and the rest of the immigration consortium. Working Paper (ungated), IZA Discussion Paper No. 17711, NBER Working Paper 33558. Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review
Abstract: We estimate intergenerational mobility of the children of immigrants across fifteen destination countries. In most destinations, first-generation immigrants have lower incomes than the local born, but gaps narrow in the second generation. Differences in parental income account for about half of the second-generation gap. The remainder reflects mobility differences at a given parental income. Daughters of immigrants are more mobile than daughters of locals almost everywhere, while sons of immigrants advance in the Anglosphere but fall behind in continental Europe. Cross-country variation in mobility is not driven by parental country-of-origin, but is associated with destination educational systems and labor markets.
The Role of Firms in Occupational Transitions
Joint with Jeremias Kläui, Daniel Kopp, and Rafael Lalive. CEPR Discussion Paper No. 21027, RFBerlin Discussion Paper No. 020/26. This project was financed by the National Research Program on Digital Transformation NRP-77. Previously circulated under the longer title "Adapting to Scarcity: The Role of Firms in Occupational Mobility"
Abstract: We analyze whether, why, and when firms are reluctant to hire occupational movers. We draw on unemployment insurance records linked with application diaries and clickstream data from a recruitment platform. Movers are contacted 21% and hired 26% less often than occupational incumbents. Part of this gap reflects negative selection: relative to equally qualified incumbents, movers face a 7% lower contact rate. A framework of employer screening under uncertainty attributes this gap to movers' lower expected overlap with the job's requirements — a prediction we test using a new measure of occupational similarity based on overlap in job requirements across vacancies. The measure explains four-fifths of the mover gap and shows that it is 3.3 times larger in occupations with homogeneous requirements. Firms also value occupational experience and credentials and contact more movers in tight occupations. Changes in firm behavior account for a third of the shift of contacts and hires toward movers as occupations tighten.
How Ethnic Discrimination Varies across Recruiters and with the Candidate Pool: Evidence and Implications for Unemployment
Joint with Daniel Kopp and Dominik Hangartner. Draft available upon request. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Abstract: This paper examines whether ethnic discrimination is common among recruiters, depends on the applicant pool, and prolongs minorities' unemployment. We peer over recruiters' shoulders when making actual hiring decisions by tracking their clicks on the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service. Estimating minorities' contact penalties relative to otherwise equivalent Swiss job seekers for individual recruiters, we find that ethnic discrimination varies substantially across recruiters but is nevertheless widespread: almost one-third of recruiters discriminates non-Europeans statistically significantly. Discrimination against Non-Europeans increases with the number of candidates for the job. Discrimination against Europeans does not, as Europeans face less discrimination if they compete with more non-Swiss candidates. Finally, we match the job seekers on the platform to their entries in the Swiss unemployment register. We find evidence that discrimination contributes to explaining why minority job seekers are unemployed longer compared to similar Swiss job seekers. Our results suggest that ethnic discrimination is prevalent among recruiters and prolongs minorities' unemployment, particularly in slack labor markets.
Host Country Citizenship Reduces Hiring Discrimination against Immigrant Minorities
Joint with Daniel Kopp and Dominik Hangartner. Draft available upon request. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Abstract: Widespread hiring discrimination limits immigrants’ economic integration and deprives host societies of productive talent. A central but unresolved question is whether policies that grant immigrants formal membership in the host society can reduce discrimination by changing how employers treat otherwise similar applicants. This study provides large-scale behavioral evidence that host-country citizenship reduces unequal treatment in hiring. We analyze clickstream data from the Swiss public employment service’s online recruitment platform, covering 39,687 recruiters, 373,880 searches, and 3.4 million profile views. The platform records which jobseekers recruiters view and contact, while displaying structured information on nationality, names, language skills, education, and work experience. This setting allows us to compare contact rates for observably similar native citizens, non-citizen immigrants, and naturalized immigrants appearing in the same recruiter searches. We use supervised machine learning to adjust for recruiter-visible jobseeker characteristics and their interactions. Non-citizen European immigrants are 7.7% less likely, and non-European immigrants 13.9% less likely, to be contacted than comparable native citizens. Swiss citizenship lowers these penalties to 6.7% and 8.1%, corresponding to reductions of 13% and 41%. Within-person estimates comparing the same immigrants before and after naturalization corroborate this pattern. Mechanism analyses suggest that citizenship mainly relaxes public-sector barriers for European immigrants. For non-European immigrants, it appears to reduce uncertainty about productivity, consistent with a reduction in statistical discrimination. These findings show that citizenship can shape not only immigrants’ rights and incentives, but also how employers interpret immigrant background during hiring.
Job Seekers' Beliefs and Preferences over Wages and Benefits: Experimental Evidence from Online Job Boards
Joint with Andreas Beerli, Stefano Fiorin, Andreas Gulyas, Daniel Kopp, and Masha Khoshnama. This project is financed by the National Research Program on Digital Transformation NRP-77
Abstract: We estimate how job seekers value wages and job benefits, how well informed they are about compensation differences across employers, and how they update their beliefs when shown information. In a field experiment, we randomly embed wage and benefit information from the market-leading employer-review platform on job ads for 265,000 users of a Swiss job board network. The revealed-preference estimates suggest that a 1% higher posted wage increases clicks to view and engage with the ad by 0.4%. A conceptual framework decomposes this elasticity into preferences, prior knowledge, and belief updating, which we identify through a belief-elicitation experiment with users from the same job boards: job seekers underestimate wage differences across jobs by half, know little about benefit differences, and update beliefs only partially. Accounting for these information frictions, the implied own-wage elasticity of applications is 2.5-2.9. Moreover, among the twelve benefits shown across the experiment, job seekers value four significantly: a company car (10% of wages), work from home (8%), firm-sponsored childcare (6%), and a parking spot (4%). The average position offers benefits worth 11% of wages. Because higher-paying jobs offer more benefits, inequality in total compensation exceeds wage inequality.
Selected further work in progress
Discrimination and Job Search Outcomes
Joint with Dominik Hangartner and Kristina Schüpbach. This project is financed by the NCCR on the move.
Golden Shackles? The Effects of Pension Portability on Job Mobility and Wages
Joint with Enea Baselgia, Simon Jäger, and Benjamin Schoefer
The Labor Market Effects of Extending Collective Bargaining Agreements
Joint with Matthias Bing, Arindrajit Dube, Nicolas Marti, and Dina Pomeranz. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
AI and Unemployment: Evidence from Switzerland
Joint with David Dorn, Giulian Etingin-Frati, Jeremias Kläui, and Andreas Müller. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Corporate Tax Cuts, Employment, and Immigration: Evidence from Switzerland
Joint with Marius Brülhart, Guillaume Rais, Enea Baselgia, Jeremias Kläui
Status: Draft in progress
Minimum Wages and Amenities
Joint with Andreas Gulyas and Giulian Etingin-Frati. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Status: Draft in progress