Essays in Discrimination and Inequality

This dissertation focuses on discrimination and inequality. The first chapter investigates whether socioemotional skills are valuable for employers in the hiring stage, and whether signaling socioemotional CVs can help women in getting hired. The unique dataset we collect allows us to differentiate the different processes in screening: long list, short list, and interview invitation. We find that a small percentage of employers filter out male candidates when they make a long list, and no gender discrimination occurs after this initial stage of filtering. Employers value socioemotional skill signals positively only when they specifically ask for them. On the other hand, they evaluate the socioemotional skills signals negatively when they do not ask for them, but this holds only for female candidates. Using a discrete choice experiment, the second chapter focuses on how to signal socioemotional skills in CVs, and finds that socioemotional skills in CVs are valuable to employers in the hiring stage, but only when signaled through costly activities rather than adjectives. The focus of the final chapter is on inequality and its consequences on disruptive behavior. We investigate how the unequal distribution of monetary payoffs can trigger disruptive behavior against people with whom there is no previous or expected future contact. We compare an environment in which reducing inequality is safe for the rich with one in which reducing inequality puts the rich in a vulnerable position, and we find that inequality triggers the poor’s disruptive behavior towards rich strangers. Moreover, the same level of inequality leads to a higher degree of frustration and disruptive behavior among the poor when the rich can safely reduce inequality. This behavioral change is driven by a change in the poor’s expectations, which are more optimistic compared to the case in which the rich are in a vulnerable position.