Xenophobia or Immigration Policies? A Field Experiment on Hiring Discrimination of High-Skilled Immigrants

N/A

2023-05-01

2023-09-01

Call-back rates to job postings in the U.S. and in Canada

We are tracking the call-back rates for our fictitious resumes

Our field experiment will examine the difference in callback rates received from applications to internet job postings by fictitious foreign-born and American-born applicants. The immigration residency status of these immigrants will include students on temporary education visa, lawful permanent residents, and naturalized citizens. We will vary the perceived origin/ethnicity the applicants using signals provided by Hispanic-, Chinese-, Indian-, and white-sounding names (male). We also randomly assign the following characteristics: the post-secondary institution, work and internship experience, awards and extracurricular campus activities, GPA, and graduation year. The job vacancies to which our fictitious applicants will apply are in the computer science industry. We will employ an approach similar to matched-pairs by applying to each selected job opening with a set of three resumes. The same experiment will be carried out in Canada.

Our experiment will employ an approach similar to matched-pairs by applying to each selected job opening with a set of three resumes. We plan to apply to 2,000 job openings in the U.S. and 2,000 in Canada over the course of 25 weeks, producing 12,000 data points for analysis. We will update these data collection goals following the completion of a pilot study and consequent power analysis.
The resume triplets will be matched as follows. In the United States:
● Resume Type 1- Applicant will list their status as a citizen.
● Resume Type 2- Applicant will list their status as permanent resident.
● Resume Type 3 - Applicant will list their F-1 visa status.
In Canada:
● Resume Type 1- Applicant will list their status as a citizen.
● Resume Type 2- Applicant will list their status as permanent resident.
● Resume Type 3 - Applicant will list their status as an international student or list their
post-graduation work permit (PGWP) (when relevant).

Furthermore, we will vary the perceived cultural origin of each applicant (using their name) across four types of applicant sets (domestic White-sounding names, non-domestic Indian-sounding names, non-domestic Chinese-sounding names, non-domestic Hispanic-sounding names). Given prior research on the sensitivity of correspondence studies to name selection, the names selected will be chosen from those previously tested by researchers to: (1) confirm they are perceived as ethnically distinct and (2) to mitigate the extent to which socioeconomic-based naming practices may bias racial perceptions. The White-, Hispanic-, Chinese-, and Indian-sounding names will be based on those examined by Gaddis et. al (2019).

Randomization done in office through an online tool (Resume randomizer)

Individual resumes

No

N/A

Aiming for 12,000 (subject to how the pilot goes)

Aiming for 12,000 (subject to how the pilot goes)

To revisit after pilot