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Many OECD countries invest heavily in labour-market programs to prolong careers. Although active labour-market programs designed for this purpose have frequently been evaluated, less is known about the employment impact of more passive regimes that make labour-market participation later in life feasible. This study focuses on the latter by investigating the hiring opportunities of senior job candidates who partake in a system that ensures older labour-market participants a company supplement in addition to unemployment benefits when they are dismissed. Therefore, we conduct a state-of-the-art scenario experiment in which 360 genuine recruiters evaluate fictitious job candidates who have spent varying durations unemployed in regimes with and without the company supplement. Because they evaluate candidates with respect to both hireability and productivity perceptions, we can identify the mechanisms at play. Overall, we find no evidence of employer-side stigma hindering the re-employment of older unemployed in the program. On the contrary, the longer-term unemployed even benefit – in terms of hiring chances – from partaking in this regime because it seemingly mitigates the regular stigmatisation of long-term unemployment, especially for men. More concretely, recruiters judge the long-term unemployed more mildly, especially with respect to perceived flexibility, when they receive the company supplement and still apply.

We investigate the drivers of gender differentials in hiring chances. More concretely, we test (i) whether recruiters perceive job applicants in gender stereotypical terms when making hiring decisions and (ii) whether the activation of these gender stereotypes in recruiters’ minds varies by the salience of gender in a particular hiring context and the gender prototypicality of a job applicant, as hypothesised in Ridgeway and Kricheli-Katz (2013). To this end, we conduct an innovative vignette experiment in the United States with 290 genuine recruiters who evaluate fictitious job applicants regarding their hireability and 21 statements related to specific gender stereotypes. Moreover, we experimentally manipulate both the gender prototypicality of a job applicant and the salience of gender in the hiring context. We find that employers perceive women in gender stereotypical terms when making hiring decisions. In particular, women are perceived to be more social and supportive than men, but also as less assertive and physically strong. Furthermore, our results indicate that the gender prototypicality of job applicants moderates these perceptions: the less prototypical group of African American women, who are assumed to be less prototypical, are perceived in less stereotypical terms than white women, while some stereotypes are more outspoken when female résumés reveal family responsibilities.

The existing burnout literature has predominantly focussed on the determinants of burnout, whereas its consequences for individual careers have received little attention. In this study, we investigate whether recently burned-out individuals and persons with a very high risk of clinical burnout differ in job preferences from non-burned-out workers. Moreover, we link these differences in preferences with (1) diverging perceptions of job demands and resources in a job, as well as (2) distinct weighting of such perceptions. To this end, a high-quality sample of 582 employees varying in their history and current risk of burnout judged fictitious job offers with experimentally manipulated characteristics in terms of their willingness to apply as well as perceived job demands and resources. We find that recently burned-out employees appreciate possibilities to telework and fixed feedback relatively more, while being relatively less attracted to opportunities for learning on the job. Moreover, employees with a very high risk of burnout are more attracted to part-time jobs. These findings can be partially explained by differences in the perceived resources offered by jobs.

Over the last decades, researchers have found compelling evidence of hiring discrimination toward ethnic minorities based on field experiments using fictitious job applications. Despite increasing efforts to discover why ethnic minorities experience hiring penalties, the academic world has not yet found a satisfying answer. With this study, we aim to close this gap in the literature by conducting a state-of-the-art scenario experiment with genuine American recruiters. In the experiment, we ask recruiters to assess fictitious job applicants of various race-ethnicities but consistent social class. The applicants are rated on 22 statements related to the dominant explanations for ethnic discrimination in hiring that the models of taste-based and statistical discrimination have offered. We find that different race-ethnicity groups are evaluated rather similarly, except for Asian Americans, who are perceived to have better intellectual abilities and organizational skills and to be more ambitious, motivated, efficient, and open. These results suggest that the hiring discrimination found in previous experimental research might be overestimated because part of the reported hiring penalty may be attributed to aspects other than race-ethnicity.

University students’ smartphone use has recently been shown to negatively affect their academic performance. Surprisingly, research testing the empirical validity of potential mechanisms underlying this relationship is very limited. In particular, indirect effects of negative health consequences due to heavy smartphone use have never been investigated. To fill this gap, we investigate, for the first time, whether deteriorated sleep quality drives the negative impact on academic performance. To this end, we examine longitudinal data on 1,635 students at two major Belgian universities. Based on a combination of a random effects approach and seemingly unrelated regression, we find no statistically significant mediating effect of sleep quality in the relationship between smartphone use and academic performance.

To study hiring discrimination against cancer survivors, we conduct a vignette experiment in which American and British recruiters evaluate fictitious job candidates. Candidates differed by periods of non-employment in their career, including non-employment due to suffering from cancer. We study the effect of cancer experiences on the recruiters' hiring decisions, as well as its effect on underlying candidate perceptions, related to various potential forms of stigma identified in the literature. We find that employment opportunities are lower for candidates with a history of cancer, compared to candidates without such a gap. This penalty is particularly explained by perceptions that these candidates will have higher sick leave probabilities and create additional costs. However, relative to candidates with a comparable gap due to depression or personal reasons, former cancer patients are less stigmatised, with relatively favourable assessments of their emotional abilities, social abilities, motivation and positive impact on workplace culture.

To explain the mixed findings on hiring discrimination against homosexual applicants, we explore the perceptual drivers behind employers' evaluations of gay men and lesbian women. Therefore, we conduct an extensive vignette experiment among 404 genuine recruiters, for which we test systematically-selected perceptions theoretically associated with homosexual job candidates in earlier studies. We find causal evidence for distinct effects of sexual identities on candidate perceptions and interview probabilities. In particular, interview probabilities are positively (negatively) associated with the perception of lesbian women (gay men) as being more (less) pleasant to work with compared to heterosexual candidates. In addition, interview chances are negatively associated with the perception of gay men and lesbian women as being more outspoken. Furthermore, our data align well with the idea of a concentrated discrimination account, whereby a minority of employers who privately hold negative attitudes towards homosexual individuals are responsible for most instances of hiring discrimination.

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club's first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association between success as a professional head coach and prior experience of former professional players as a youth coach, player-coach, head coach at a lower division, assistant coach, in other staff positions and in club management positions. Our regression analyses, based on unique coach career data, show a significant positive association for the jobs of assistant or youth coach.

In recent decades, researchers have found compelling evidence of discrimination in the labor and housing market toward ethnic minorities based on field experiments using fictitious applications. However, these findings may be exaggerated as the names used for ethnic minorities in various experiments may have also signaled low socioeconomic class. Therefore, in this study, we perform a name categorization experiment in the United States that yields 56 names associated with six ethnicity groups, which signal different ethnicities and genders but similar social classes. These names should greatly improve the validity of future experiments on ethnic discrimination.

This letter discusses the evolution of key labour market indicators in the EU-27 countries between 2019 and 2020, i.e. between the year before the COVID-19 crisis broke out and the year in which it impacted the economy heavily. Whereas earlier policy-oriented studies have dealt with the evolution of unemployment in 2020, often country by country, this letter focuses on the evolution of unemployment as well as inactivity across European countries. Indeed, previous crises have typically lead not only to more unemployment but also to larger numbers of discouraged unemployed and thus more inactivity. It appears that the Southern European countries, in particular, recorded increases in inactivity, while the Baltic States experienced higher unemployment. In many other countries, unemployment and inactivity remained remarkably stable despite COVID-19. JEL Classification: J64, J08, J23, J24, J68

Multitasking – alternating between two different tasks at the same time – has become a daily habit for many university students. However, this may come at a cost since the existing literature emphasises the negative association between multitasking and academic performance. Nonetheless, this literature is based on cross-sectional observational data so that that estimates cannot be given a causal interpretation. To complement these studies, we opted for a longitudinal design in this study. Specifically, for three consecutive years, students at two Belgian universities, in more than ten different study programmes, were surveyed on their multitasking preferences and academic performance. Then, these results were merged with the students' exam scores. We exploited the longitudinal character of the data by running random and fixed effect models. Our results indicate that the positive and negative aspects of multitasking with respect to academic performance cancel each other out.

Recent studies have explored hiring discrimination as an obstacle to former burnout patients. Many workers, however, return to the same employer, where they face an even more severe aftermath of burnout syndrome: promotion discrimination. To our knowledge, we are the first to directly address this issue in research. More specifically, we conducted a vignette experiment with 406 genuine managers, testing the potential of the main burnout stigma theoretically described in the literature as potential mediators of promotion discrimination. Estimates reveal that compared to employees without an employment interruption, former burnout patients have no less than a 34.4% lower probability of receiving a promotion. Moreover, these employees are perceived as having low (1) leadership, (2) learning capacity, (3) motivation, (4) autonomy and (5) stress tolerance, as well as being (6) less capable of taking on an exemplary role, (7) having worse current and (8) future health, (9) collaborating with them is regarded more negatively, and (10) managers perceive them as having fewer options to leave the organisation if denied a promotion. Four of these perceptions, namely lower leadership capacities, stress tolerance, abilities to take on an exemplary role and chances of finding another job explain almost half the burnout effect on promotion probabilities.

Previous studies have demonstrated a strong negative association between smartphone use and sleep quality. However, the majority of these studies quantified smartphone use with subjective self-reported metrics. In contrast, the current study contributes to the literature by objectively logging university students' smartphone use and investigating the association thereof with sleep quality. The extensive, nuanced smartphone usage information obtained from this logging also enables us to explore the validity of several mechanisms theorised to underlie the previously reported negative association between smartphone use and sleep quality. In contrast to earlier research, we do not find a significant association between sleep quality and the duration or frequency of students' daily smartphone use. However, students with the internalised habit of launching a greater number of applications per session ('gateway habits') experience worse sleep quality. This finding is consistent with literature showing that smartphone-related stress is more strongly associated with checking habits stemming from 'fear-ofmissing-out' than with overall screen time.

University students' smartphone use has recently been shown to negatively affect their academic performance. Surprisingly, research testing the empirical validity of potential mechanisms underlying this relationship is very limited. In particular, indirect effects of negative health consequences due to heavy smartphone use have never been investigated. To fill this gap, we investigate, for the first time, whether deteriorated sleep quality drives the negative impact on academic performance. To this end, we examine longitudinal data on 1,635 students at two major Belgian universities. Based on a combination of a random effects approach and seemingly unrelated regression, we find no statistically significant mediating effect of sleep quality in the relationship between smartphone use and academic performance.

We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one's parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we exploit rich longitudinal data on 1,653 Belgian freshmen students' residential status and exam scores to control for observed heterogeneity as well as for individual fixed (or random) effects. We find that after correcting for unobserved heterogeneity, the association found in earlier contributions disappears. This finding of no significant impact of living in a student room on exam results is robust for other methods used for causal inference including instrumental variable techniques.