8th CESifo Monthly Webinar on Labor Economics

Scientific organizer: Professor Gordon B. Dahl

The CESifo Webinars on Labor Economics were launched after the very first Area Conference of the Labor Economics Area of the CESifo Research Network was canceled due to COVID-19. In order to build and connect a network of researchers in labor economics on both sides of the Atlantic, the webinars will run on a monthly basis with different speakers for each event. 

Lectures by Patrick Kline (University of California, Berkeley) and Joachim Winter (LMU Munich)

Patrick Kline will talk on Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers (co-authors Evan Rose and Christopher Walters).

We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomly generated characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of an employer callback by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.8 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, implying that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women. Company-specific contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent and negatively correlated with firm profitability and racial diversity among store managers and board members. Job-level contact gaps exhibit little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains more than half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Distributional estimates reveal that racial discrimination is highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile responsible for roughly 50% of the lost callbacks to Black applicants in our study. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants, while one discriminates against male applicants. Our findings reveal a stable organizational structure to employment discrimination.

Joachim Winter will talk on The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents (co-authors Jeffrey Grogger and Andreas Steinmayr).

Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.

General Information on the Webinar

The webinar will begin at 6pm (CEST) on Thursday, 8 July 2021. Each speaker will give a 35 minute presentation and participants will then have the opportunity to pose questions.  Questions will also be encouraged during the lectures.

Please register here*

*Please note that you will be directed to an external website for registration.