Job referrals for minority workers: Impacts on a manufacturing firm in India

This study focuses on referral-based hiring at a manufacturing firm in India. The intervention disproportionately diverts referral opportunities to underrepresented incumbent workers belonging to lower caste groups, relative to a control group where referral opportunities are given to randomly picked workers, regardless of their caste. This intervention is conducted at the level of production teams inside the firm. A lab-in-field experiment is implemented as an extension, to test how this referral-based hiring policy compares with other commonly used hiring programs designed to improve diversity in teams.

2024-02-01

2024-07-31

- Demographic composition of teams (share of lower caste workers, team size)
- Team level productivity data
- Team level retention, attrition and turnover data
- Self-reported social cohesion, contact outside the firm, job satisfaction, worker bargaining power (team level, both average and extreme values)
- Job search intensity and worker outside options
- Beliefs about ability of, diligence of and cohesion with out-groups

Edit: as planned at baseline, I am defining additional measures from the lab-in-field experiment:
- Productivity, both individual and group, and both pooled and separately for high and low coordination tasks
- Cooperation in group tasks
- Beliefs about out groups and subsequent referral allocation

- Team leaders' beliefs about workers' attitudes, ability, cohesion, and referral quality
- Team leaders' reversion to status-quo referral allocation after the end of the intervention
- Referral candidates' labor market outcomes

Edit: as planned at baseline, I am defining additional measures based on the endline measurement:
- Team leaders' time use across training, management, and production support
- Team leaders' hypothetical referral allocation
- Workers' estimation of referral candidates' labor market outcomes

The experiment involves randomizing teams at a manufacturing firm in India into one of two groups. In status quo, workers at this firm are primarily hired through referrals that are allocated to incumbent workers by team leaders based on their discretion. As part of this experiment, teams in the treatment group will have referral opportunities be given randomly within the set of lower caste incumbent workers, while teams in the control group will have referral opportunities be given to a randomly selected worker regardless of their caste. These teams are organized by task type within lines and shifts, and treatment status will be stratified by task type, team size, and baseline share of lower caste workers.

Edit: following the endline with the firm's workers, I conducted a lab-in-field experiment, wherein teams of workers were asked to work on a group task involving cutting strips of fabric that were then tied together to produce ropes. Each team had one lower caste and two upper caste workers. After one round of the task, the teams were allocated into three different groups that determined how the teams grew from three to four members. In the first group, mimicking the intervention in the firm, the fourth member was a referral of the incumbent lower caste worker on the team. In the second group, the fourth member was a referral of a randomly selected incumbent upper caste member of the team. In the third group, the fourth member was not a referral of any of the incumbent workers. This group was informed that the fourth worker is being added to balance the team by caste. Following this, the workers performed the same task in another session. At the end of the second session, the workers complete an endline survey and play a symbol matching game, designed to assess their coordination with each other.

Not available

Randomization conducted through a computer algorithm. The implementation is controlled through the firm's HR department, who are given the names of workers who will receive referral opportunities for each team in advance.

The main intervention is delivered at the team level, of which there are 132 at the start of the experiment. Regressions on finer outcomes will have standard errors clustered at the team level.

No

132

For the lab in field extension: approximately 120 teams

132 teams, approximately 800-1000 workers at baseline, and approximately 2500-3000 referral candidates. For the lab in field extension: approximately 4 workers per team (~ 500 workers in total).

61 treatment teams, 61 control teams.

For the lab in field extension: 50 teams with referrals to lower caste workers; 20 teams with referrals to upper caste workers; 50 teams with affirmative action additions to teams (without referrals)