Can skills alleviate ethnic discrimination in hiring? Evidence from the German apprenticeship market

This study investigates whether the social, digital, and analytical skills of job applicants,
as well as their knowledge about the profession, can mitigate ethnic disparities
in entry-level positions in the labour market. We conducted a survey experiment
among a large, nationally representative sample of German firms that
hire apprentices. We asked recruiters to evaluate the probability of inviting fictitious
applicants to a job interview based on randomised characteristics, including
ethnicity, skill quality, gender, time of residence, and education level. Our results
show heterogeneous effects of skills on ethnic discrimination. While social skills
help alleviate discrimination, our results indicate that discrimination intensifies at
higher levels of knowledge about the profession, implying greater disparities due to
ethnic discrimination at the top of the skill distribution. We also found that the
effect of skills differs depending on the ethnicity of the applicant.