Attractiveness can provide an individual with advantages that less attractive people may not be granted. These advantages can be seen in everyday life through the perception that attractive individuals are more intelligent, friendly, and employees. Many researchers have found that attractiveness can have an influence on who gets the job and who does not. Past research on the influence of attractiveness on hiring practices has been conducted from an explicit attitude perspective. Explicit attitudes are evaluations that are thought out and conform to social norms, while implicit attitudes are unconscious evaluations before the influence of social norm. Implicit and explicit attitudes are considered two different constructs and accessed for different reasons. It was hypothesized that hiring agents would consider attractive applicants better suited when using an implicit attitude. Additionally there would be differences between male and female hiring agents. Results indicate that hiring agents associated attractive applicants with good job attributes when using an implicit attitude. However, there was no difference between male and female hiring agents, as both associated attractive applicants with good job attributes equally. The results also demonstrated that not all implicit and explicit attitudes diverge as previous research has indicated. The study also found a number of applicant attributes that contribute to the influence of whether to interview and hire attractive and unattractive applicants.

This study aimed to demonstrate how negative affect is linked with stereotypic thinking in hiring decisions made in everyday situations. Participants (n = 788) will be randomly assigned to each condition. Each participant will be given a neutral emotion inducing picture or an anger emotion inducing picture, followed by either a white or black candidate resume with the same qualifications, and then asked how likely they are to hire the candidate. Results would most likely suggest that anger leads to increased stereotypic thinking in hiring decisions. Future studies may decide to investigate 1) a wider array of negative emotions and 2) a more diverse set of candidates (e.g. examining effects of gender or race).

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This thesis presents three essays, each seeking to deepen our understanding of labour markets. The first essay studies the response of real wages and hours of new hires to the business cycle during the UK’s Great Recession. The second essay analysis in how far the assumption of rational expectations in the Mortensen-Pissarides model is required for the economy to converge to an equilibrium. In particular, it asks if it is possible for economic agents to use simple linear forecast rules and still ensure convergence to the rational expectations equilibrium. The final essay seeks to determine whether labour income shares at the sectoral level are constant across countries, as is usually assumed in the literature, and whether this assumption quantitatively matters. Therefore, it takes the input-output structures across countries into account, and conducts a development accounting exercise. Real wages and hours in the Great Recession: Evidence from firms and their entry-level jobs Using employer-employee panel data, I provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK’s Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, my data enables me to address the cyclical composition of jobs. I show that firms were able to respond to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages of 2.8 per cent for new hires and 2.6 per cent for job stayers. Hours of new hires in entry-level jobs were also substantially procyclical, while job-stayer hours were nearly constant. My findings suggest that models assuming rigid labour costs of new hires are not helpful for understanding the behaviour of unemployment over the business cycle. Unemployment and econometric learning I apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen-Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective, the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks. Measuring sectoral income shares: Accounting for input-output structures across countries I use input-output tables to measure the labour income shares of the goods and the services sector for a large cross-section of mostly developed countries. I present two novel findings: sectoral labour income shares significantly increase with the level of development, and within-country differences between these income shares are uncorrelated with the level of development. These cross-country differences are not caused by variation in the input-output structure or final demand, but originate at the production-side of the economy. I measure sectoral total factor productivity using a development accounting framework to assess the quantitative importance of my findings. The goods sector of less developed countries is relatively less productive than the services sector; assuming that the values of the sectoral labour income shares across countries are identical to their corresponding U.S. values leads to an underestimation of productivity differences across countries. All findings are robust to different adjustments for the labour income of the self-employed.

Essay 1 (with Oskar Nordström Skans): This paper provides field evidence on the causal impact of past successes on future performances. Since persistence in success or failure is likely to be linked through, potentially time-varying, ability it is intrinsically difficult to identify the causal effect of succeeding on the probability of performing well in the future. We therefore employ a regression discontinuity design on data from professional golf tournaments exploiting that almost equally skilled players are separated into successes and failures half-way into the tournaments (the “cut”). We show that players who (marginally) succeeded in making the cut substantially increased their performance in subsequent tournaments relative to players who (marginally) failed to make the cut. This success-effect is substantially larger when the subsequent (outcome) tournament involves more prize money. The results therefore suggest that past successes provide an important prerequisite when performing high-stakes tasks. Essay 2: Recent experimental evidence suggests that women in general are more discouraged than men by failures which potentially can explain why women, on average, are less likely than men to reach top-positions in firms. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence from the field on this issue using data from all-female and all-male professional golf tournaments to see if this result can be replicated among competitive men and women. These top-performing men and women are active in an environment with multiple rounds of competition and the institutional set-up of the tournaments makes it possible to causally estimate the effect of the result in one tournament on the performance in the next. The results show that both male and female golfers respond negatively to a failure and that their responses are virtually identical. This finding suggests that women’s difficulties in reaching top-positions in firms are caused by external rather than internal barriers. Essay 3: Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of such dynamic adjustments utilizing voting age discontinuities caused by Swedish laws. I employ a regression discontinuity strategy on Swedish register data to estimate the causal effect of early age voting right on political knowledge around age 18. The results do not support the existence of positive causal effects of early age voting right on political knowledge. Thus, we should not expect that 16-year-olds respond by acquiring more political knowledge if they are given the right to vote. This finding weakens the case for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16. Essay 4 (with Lena Hensvik): We postulate that firms’ production losses  from absence depend on the employees’ internal substitutability, incentivizing firms to keep absence low in positions with few substitutes. Using Swedish employer-employee data we show that absence is substantially lower in such positions even conditional on establishment and occupation fixed effects. The result reflects sorting on both entry and exit margins, with stronger separations responses when it was difficult to predict the absence of the employees beforehand. These findings highlight that internal substitution insures firms against production disruptions caused by absence and that absence costs are important aspects of firms’ hiring and separations decisions.