We study urban, private sector Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board.
Potential participants were telephoned over a period of 21 consecutive nights between 6 pm and 8 pm local time, and up to five callbacks were made to establish contact.
Finally, the first row of Table 1 shows that NLH applicants are substantially more likely than LH applicants to receive an employer callback: 7.2percentt of applicants with local hukou are contacted by firms' HR departments when they apply for a job compared to 8.6percentt for NLH workers, a gap of 19percentt.
Of course, the low callback rate may also simply reflect local labor market conditions.
For example, we show that migrants' 11percentt callback advantage relative to equally qualified local applicants to the same job (our analog to the quantity estimated by the resume audit approach) substantially understates their advantage when still controlling for qualifications, but when not conditioning on where they apply.
The operator makes its low rates possible by running a huge phone callback program, called **100 Program, which assigns local land line phone numbers to its mobile customers while they are abroad and then has a company computer in China call them back over less-expensive land lines to complete their long-distance calls.
This point estimate is unaffected by the inclusion of additional controls in column 2. Columns 3 and 4 report the results for the subsample of local employers, revealing no statistically significant difference in first callback rates between local and foreign applicants either.
The resume audit study involved (1) submitting hundreds of fictitious resumes online in response to postings for skilled occupations (software developer and programmer, accountant, and engineer) by two kinds of employers (foreign and local) in the Myanmar labor market and (2) measuring callbacks for each resume submitted.
To assess if callback rates are different across employer subgroups (foreign, local) and occupation subgroups (accountant, software developer, engineer), I restrict the sample according to the subpopulation of interest and report results for each subpopulation group separately.
