Labour market discrimination: Relative, additive, and multiplicative effects

In a preregistered nationwide factorial survey experiment among 5,017 representative Danish employers and 20,068 vignettes, we examine labour market discrimination across five applicant characteristics spanning gender, age, ethnicity, employment status, and preferences for working time. The experiment enables us to examine how job applicant characteristics have relative, additive, and multiplicative effects on labour market discrimination. Our findings suggest that discrimination in previous correspondence studies is mostly additive, meaning that multiple disadvantageous characteristics add up to high levels of discrimination. The most disadvantaged profile has a hireability score of 1.1 on a 0-10 scale and a five percent chance of being selected over other applicants. The most advantaged profile has a hireability score of 6.9 and an 84 percent chance of being selected. As for relative effects, age discrimination against older applicants outweighs other manipulated characteristics in our study. Finally, we find that male employers and production workplaces favor male applicants.