The
Management Department
Department Seminar Series
ROXANA BARBuLESCU
HEC PARIS
Tuesday, January 22nd
2019
Room LE
CLUB at 10:00 am
Theme: “Outrunning
the past? Prior employer status and job matching in the MBA labor market”
Abstract: How external candidates are matched to
jobs has important implications for job segregation and income inequality.
Existing studies have found the status of prior affiliations to stratify
opportunities in the labor market, meaning that individuals with past high
status affiliations fare better in subsequent career outcomes. However,
possibly because existing studies are limited to one industry, we currently
ignore if alternative attainment routes may be open to job seekers who lack
such high status affiliations. In this paper we seek to fill this gap by taking
a view of job matching as a two-sided process comprised of sequential decisions
by applicants and employers. While future employers may use candidates’ prior
employer affiliations to evaluate candidates, candidates will also anticipate
employers’ behaviors and consider their prior affiliations when evaluating
their chances of success in different jobs. We test our hypotheses in the
context of job searches of MBA students from a large international business
school. Using longitudinal survey and archival data on three cohorts (836
individuals) and Fortune and Vault industry rankings of their prior employers
(2586 distinct firms), we investigate the relative probabilities of individuals
coming from higher- vs. lower-ranked backgrounds to apply to, get offer from,
and accept offers in the main job domains in this setting. The results suggest
the existence of alternative routes for attainment, such that lower-ranked job
seekers recover some of their initial difference in income relative to the
higher-ranked job seekers in their post-MBA jobs. Furthermore, we find that
this stems from a final allocation of jobs across higher- vs. lower-ranked
candidates that is driven primarily by the job seekers’ application decisions
and only secondarily by employers’ offers decisions. Lower-ranked job seekers
tend to move more across domains, such that they are disproportionately more
likely to apply to – and sometimes even to receive offers in – positions in job
domains different than their prior background, albeit with some important
limitations. Our findings have implications for research on status and
attainment, distribution of human capital resources among firms, and the
conceptualization of relative status hierarchies in labor markets.
