Dylan Glover’s scientific contributions

In the first chapter I study how the job performance of minorities changes depending on whether they work with managers who are more or less biased against their type. I show that when minorities work with more biased managers they perform significantly worse compared to majority workers on a range of performance indicators. Yet minority performance is higher when working with non-biased managers. We argue that this is evidence of a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby biased managers make minorities less productive and this generates statistical discrimination in the firm’s hiring policy. The second chapter explores how shocking the value of a vacancy through offering free recruiting services to firms affects their demand for labor. Offering free recruitment services leads to large increases in vacancy postings. Furthermore, this translates into significant increases in hires in permanent contracts. These results suggest that active labor market policies directed at generating firm labor demand may have substantial added value in the labor market. In the final chapter it is shown that the the Charlie Hebdo attacks significantly reduced Muslim minority job search effort. Frims also reduced their search for minority candidates, but only for the permanent contracts. This drop is partially offset by an increase in counselor matching effort made for minorities after the shock, but only in areas with low latent levels of discrimination, as measured by the local vote share for the Front National.

Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers, but not majority cashiers, are scheduled to work with managers who are biased (as determined by an implicit association test), they are absent more often, spend less time at work, scan items more slowly, and take more time between customers. This appears to be because biased managers interact less with minorities, leading minorities to exert less effort. Manager bias has consequences for the average performance of minority workers: while on average minority and majority workers perform equivalently, on days where managers are unbiased, minorities perform significantly better than do majority workers. The findings are consistent with statistical discrimination in hiring whereby because minorities underperform when assigned to biased managers, the firm sets a higher hiring standard for minorities to get similar average performance from minority and nonminority workers. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.