Essays in labor economics : discrimination, productivity and matching[Essais sur l’économie du travail : discrimination, productivité et appariement]

In the first chapter I study how the job performance of minorities changes depending on whether they work with managers who are more or less biased against their type. I show that when minorities work with more biased managers they perform significantly worse compared to majority workers on a range of performance indicators. Yet minority performance is higher when working with non-biased managers. We argue that this is evidence of a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby biased managers make minorities less productive and this generates statistical discrimination in the firm's hiring policy. The second chapter explores how shocking the value of a vacancy through offering free recruiting services to firms affects their demand for labor. Offering free recruitment services leads to large increases in vacancy postings. Furthermore, this translates into significant increases in hires in permanent contracts. These results suggest that active labor market policies directed at generating firm labor demand may have substantial added value in the labor market. In the final chapter it is shown that the the Charlie Hebdo attacks significantly reduced Muslim minority job search effort. Frims also reduced their search for minority candidates, but only for the permanent contracts. This drop is partially offset by an increase in counselor matching effort made for minorities after the shock, but only in areas with low latent levels of discrimination, as measured by the local vote share for the Front National.