Do Employers Use Unemployment as aSorting Criterion When Hiring?Evidence from a Field Experiment

In this paper, we use unique data from a field experiment in the Swedish labor market toinvestigate how past and contemporary unemployment affect a young worker’s probability ofbeing invited to a job interview. In contrast to studies using registry/survey data, we havecomplete control over the information available to the employers and there is no scope forunobserved heterogeneity. We find no evidence that recruiting employers use informationabout past unemployment to sort workers, but some evidence that they use contemporaryunemployment to sort workers. The fact that employers do not seem to use pastunemployment as a sorting criterion suggests that the scarring effects of unemployment maynot be as severe as has been indicated by previous studies.....