Employers are reluctant to hire long-term unemployed applicants but prefer short-term unemployed over currently employed candidates. Policymakers are focusing on increasing the employment rate, particularly due to the impact of an ageing population on living standards and social security systems. Achieving this goal involves facilitating the transition of unemployed and inactive individuals into the workforce. However, the stigma associated with unemployment or inactivity can impede their chances of being hired....
ChatGPT-related artificial intelligence (AI) seems likely to impact the labour market by making organisational processes, such as personnel selection, more efficient. At the same time, it may also introduce and reinforce bias in these processes. A simulated CV screening task with ChatGPT shows that the chatbot discriminates based on ethnic identity when evaluating job applicants. The experiment suggests that we should be careful when using ChatGPT-like AI in selection processes....
Many correspondence audit studies on labour market discrimination have recently been published. My research with Siel Vermeiren and Stijn Baert, which appeared in the January 2023 issue of European Economic Review, synthesises the data from nearly all correspondence audit tests conducted around the world between 2005 and 2020. It thus gives a bird’s-eye view of the extent of hiring discrimination on various grounds of discrimination. How do, for example, age discrimination and ethnic discrimination compare?...