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AbstractThis study examines employment access, class attainment, and earnings among native‐born and first‐generation immigrants in Denmark using Danish administrative data from 2002. Results suggest large gaps in employment access between native‐born Danes and immigrants, as well as among immigrant groups by country of origin and time of arrival. Non‐Western immigrants and those arriving after 1984 are at a particular disadvantage compared to other immigrants, a finding not explained by education differences. Immigrants are more likely to be employed in unskilled manual jobs and less likely to be employed in professional and intermediate‐level positions than native‐born Danes, although the likelihood of obtaining higher‐level positions increases as immigrants' time in Denmark lengthens. Class attainment and accumulated work experience explain a significant portion of native‐immigrant gaps in earnings, but work experience reduces native‐immigrant gaps in class attainment for lower‐level positions only. The Danish "flexicurity" model and its implications for immigrants living in Denmark are discussed.

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Euro debt crisis, negative stereotypes about Southern Europeans were (re)activated across Northern European countries. Because these stereotypes make explicit reference to productivity-relevant traits, they have the potential to influence employers' hiring decisions. We draw on a sub-sample of the Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets discrimination study (GEMM) to investigate the responses of over 3500 firms based in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway to identical (fictitious) young applicants born to Greek, Spanish, Italian and native-born parents. Using French descendants as a placebo treatment and sub-Saharan African descendants as a benchmark treatment, we find severe levels of hiring discrimination against Southern European descendants in both Norway and the Netherlands, but not in Germany. Discrimination in Norway seems largely driven by employers' preferences for applicants of native descent, while in the Netherlands discrimination seems specifically targeted against Greek and Spanish descendants. Dutch employers' propensity to penalize these two groups seems driven by information deficits.

Abstract
We present the first large-scale comparative field experiment on appearance-based racial discrimination in hiring conducted in Europe. Using a harmonized methodology, we sent fictitious résumés to real vacancies in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, randomly varying applicants' ethnic ancestry (signaled foremost by name) and applicants' racial appearance (signaled by photographs). Applicants are young-adult country nationals born to parents from over 40 different countries of ancestry (N = 12 783). We examine average differences in callback across four phenotypic groups and four regions of ancestry and present the first cross-country comparable estimates of appearance-based racial discrimination reported in the field-experimental literature. We find that applicants' phenotype has a significant and independent effect on employers' responses in Germany and the Netherlands, whereas in Spain we only find evidence of hiring discrimination for particular combinations of phenotype and ancestry, which suggests a less direct and more complex effect of phenotype in this country. Implications are discussed.

Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women's disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers' callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.