Labour-Economics on Louis Lippens

Are employers eager to hire the unemployed?

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The worldwide state of hiring discrimination

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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? Are there regional differences? And does hiring discrimination decrease over time?

Ethnic labour market discrimination: Taste or statistics?

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, there was much talk in Belgium about the inactivity among 25- to 64-year-olds in Belgium with a non-EU27 nationality. With 44.2% of the 25- to 64-year-olds with a non-EU27 nationality neither working nor looking for work, Belgium is at the very back of the European rankings. This level of inactivity is a problem given the intention of the Flemish, Walloon and federal governments to get more people into work. In this blog post, I look at one of the possible explanations for this high level of inactivity on the employers’ side, namely hiring discrimination. More specifically, the scientific evidence for the mechanisms of hiring discrimination is discussed, and some solutions to counteract discrimination based on economics (as a science) are provided.

Top-ranked selection procedures to hire the best-performing candidate

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The holy grail of selection is no longer

To hire the top candidate for a job, we require selection procedures that provide a sound assessment of who will perform best. Classic examples of selection procedures include resume screening and job interviews – arguably also the most used selection procedures. But what does the outcome of those procedures tell us about a candidate’s potential? In other words, what predictive value do they have concerning a candidate’s future performance in a given job?