Additive or Multiplicative Disadvantage? The Scarring Effects of Unemployment for Ethnic Minorities
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2016-06-25Metadata
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Birkelund GE, Heggebø KH, Rogstad JC. Additive or Multiplicative Disadvantage? The Scarring Effects of Unemployment for Ethnic Minorities. European Sociological Review. 2017;33(1):17-29Abstract
Previous research has documented that unemployed job applicants have problems re-entering
the labor market, commonly referred to as scarring effects of unemployment. Studies have
also documented ethnic discrimination in the labor market. Yet we do not know how these
categories jointly shape employers hiring decisions. Thus, we do not know if unemployed
minorities face an additive or a multiplicative disadvantage in hiring processes. Building on
experimental data from two waves of a randomized field-experiment, we test whether we find
an ethnic scarring effect, which would imply that contemporary long-term unemployment is
particularly harmful to native born ethnic minorities. As expected, our experiment documents
scarring effects of contemporary long-term unemployment. We also found, as expected,
systematically lower call-backs for applicants with Pakistani/Muslim names. Third, our
results show that unemployed minorities face an additive disadvantage in the labor market.
Thus, we find no evidence of an ethnic scarring effect of unemployment, which would imply
different consequences of unemployment for minority and majority applicants.