This article examines disability discrimination in the hiring process and explores variation in how the intersection of disability and gender shapes employers’ hiring behavior. We use data from a field experiment in which 2,048 job applications with randomly assigned information about disability were sent to Swedish employers with vacancies. Nondisabled applicants received 33% more callbacks than similarly qualified wheelchair users despite applying for jobs for which the impairment should not interfere with performance. The results indicate no heterogeneity in disability discrimination against men and women on average across occupations or by occupational gender segregation. However, discrimination rates differ considerably among occupations, varying from no evidence of disability discrimination to discrimination against both disabled men and disabled women as well as cases in which disability discrimination is found only against women or only against men. The results indicate that discrimination based on disability, and the intersection between disability and gender, is highly occupation specific.

Labor markets in advanced economies have undergone substantial change due to globalization, technological improvements, and organizational changes, making language proficiency increasingly important even in less skilled jobs. Has this development led employers to shy away from hiring immigrants with limited host-country language skills? We shed light on this question by conducting a large-scale field experiment, where we introduce common second-language features in immigrants’ resumes. We also conduct employer surveys to interpret our experimental results. Our main finding is that language proficiency has a strong positive effect on being invited to a job interview, even in typical immigrant entry jobs.

There has been a dramatic rise in disability employment in the US since the pandemic, a pattern mirrored in other countries as well. A similar increase is not found for any other major gender, race, age or education demographic. At the same time, work from home has risen four-fold. This paper asks whether the two are causally related. Analyzing CPS and ACS microdata, we find the increase in disability employment is concentrated in occupations with high levels of working from home. Controlling for compositional changes and labor market tightness, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in work from home increases full-time employment by 1.1% for individuals with a physical disability. A back of the envelope calculation reveals that the post pandemic increase in working from home explains 80% of the rise in full-time employment. Wage data suggests that WFH increased the supply of workers with a disability, likely by reducing commuting costs and enabling better control of working conditions.

This paper estimates family spillovers in high school major choice in Sweden, where admission to oversubscribed majors is determined based on GPA. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find large sibling and intergenerational spillovers that depend on the sex mix of a dyad. Same-sex siblings copy one another, while younger brothers recoil from an older sister's choices. Fathers and mothers influence sons but not their daughters, except when a mother majors in the male-dominated program of engineering. Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that these within-family spillovers have sizable implications for the sex composition of majors.

Being overweight or obese is associated with lower employment and earnings, possibly arising from employer discrimination. A few studies have used field experiments to show that obese job applicants are, in fact, discriminated against in the hiring process. However, whether overweight job applicants also face employer discrimination is still an open question. To this end, we have designed a correspondence testing experiment in which fictitious applications are sent to real job openings across twelve different occupations in the Spanish labor market. We compare the callback rate for applications with a facial photo of a normal weight person to the one for applications with a photo of the same person manipulated into looking overweight.Applications with a photo of the weight-manipulated male receive significantly fewer callbacks for a job interview compared to normal weight, and this differential treatment is especially pronounced in female dominated occupations. For women, we find the opposite result. Weightmanipulated female applications receive slightly more callbacks, especially in female dominated occupations. Our experimental design allows us to disentangle whether employers act on attractiveness or weight when hiring. For men, the weight manipulation effect is explained by an attractiveness premium, while for women we find evidence of an attractiveness penalty, as well as a weight penalty, in explaining the effect.