Studying employers’ risk assessment and the role of institutions: An experimental design

Work Package 7 aims at understanding how early job insecurity can affect an individual’s future career from an employer’s perspective. By paying special attention to the educational background and gender of the applicants, we plan to investigate how employers interpret young applicants’ job insecurity, for example in the form of unemployment or job-mismatch experiences, during recruitment. The negative effects of such experiences on an individual’s chances of being recruited successfully – so called scarring effects – may further vary depending on economic and institutional contexts such as country-specific economic or political conditions, educational structures or economic sectors. By surveying employers from different sectors, we will examine if and how these scarring effects vary between four different countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Norway and Switzerland. We will apply an innovative methodology in the form of an employer-sided survey with an integrated multidimensional vignette experiment in order to simulate the impact of multiple factors on success and failure when young people who experienced job insecurities apply for new jobs. In the present working paper we summarise the major theoretical concepts that have been used to explain the scarring effects that can result from employer behaviour. Moreover, we outline how we plan to collect data in WP 7 in order to analyse scarring through decision-making on behalf of employers during the recruitment process.