Working Paper: NBER ID: w15564
Authors: Peter Kuhn; Kailing Shen
Abstract: We study firms' advertised preferences for gender, age, height and beauty in a sample of ads from a Chinese internet job board, and interpret these patterns using a simple employer search model. We find that these characteristics are widely and highly valued by Chinese employers, though employers' valuations are highly specific to detailed jobs and occupations. Consistent with our model, advertised preferences for gender, age, height and beauty all become less prevalent as job skill requirements rise. Cross-sectional patterns suggest some role for customer discrimination, product market competition, and corporate culture. Using the recent collapse of China's labor market as a natural experiment, we find that firms' advertised education and experience requirements respond to changing labor market conditions in the direction predicted by our model, while firms' advertised preferences for age, gender, height and beauty do not.
Keywords: employer preferences; gender discrimination; age discrimination; height discrimination; beauty discrimination
JEL Codes: J6; J7
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| advertised preferences for gender, age, height, and beauty (J71) | job skill requirements (J24) |
| labor market conditions (J29) | firms' advertised requirements for education and experience (M51) |
| labor market conditions (J29) | preferences for gender, age, height, and beauty (J71) |
| job skill requirements (J24) | prevalence of discriminatory ads (preferences for gender, age, height, and beauty) (J71) |