Making the Elite: Top Jobs, Disparities, and Solutions

This paper studies how socioeconomically biased screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might effectively reduce bias. Using administrative data on job search from an elite Indian college, I document large caste disparities in earnings. I show that these disparities arise primarily in the final round of screening, comprising non-technical personal interviews that inquire about characteristics correlated with socioeconomic status. Other job search stages do not explain disparities, including: job applications, application reading, written aptitude tests, large group debates that test for socio-emotional skills, and job choices. Through a novel model of the job placement process, I show that employer willingness to pay for an advantaged caste is as large as that for a full standard deviation increase in college GPA. A hiring subsidy that eliminates the caste penalty would be more cost-effective in diversifying elite hiring than other policies, such as those that equalize the caste distribution of pre-college test scores or enforce hiring quotas.