Making the Elite: Top Jobs, Disparities, and Solutions
Soumitra Shukla

TL;DR
This paper investigates how caste-based disparities in elite hiring arise mainly during final interviews, driven by non-technical personal assessments, and suggests targeted subsidies as effective solutions to reduce inequality.
Contribution
It identifies the specific stage where caste disparities emerge in elite hiring and evaluates policy interventions to mitigate these disparities.
Findings
Disparities do not occur in initial screening stages.
Caste influences final personal interviews significantly.
A hiring subsidy could effectively reduce caste-based inequality.
Abstract
How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian college, I show that caste disparities in hiring do not arise in many job search stages, including: applications, application reading, written aptitude tests, large group debates that assess socio-emotional skills, and job choices. Rather, disparities arise in the final round, comprising non-technical personal interviews that screen on family background, neighborhood, and "cultural fit." These characteristics are plausibly weakly correlated with productivity (at the interview round) but strongly correlated with caste. Employer willingness to pay for an advantaged caste is as large as that for a full standard deviation increase in college GPA. A hiring…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSocial and Economic Development in India · Corruption and Economic Development · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
MethodsTest
