Terrorism and the Employment of Middle Eastern Men: A Relational Approach to Event-Based Labor Market Effects

Abstract:

Malte Reichelt (FAU) and Christoph Müller (Institute for Employment Research, IAB)

Terrorist events reinforce stereotypes towards minority groups. Empirical evidence on their labor market effects, however, are mixed and inconclusive. We offer a new relational account to understanding event-based changes in ethnoracial disparities and argue that events (1) need to be understood as being embedded in a broader temporal context, which defines to what degree they evoke stereotypes about outgroup members, and (2) that stereotypes can lead to different degrees of discrimination, depending on inequality regimes of workplaces. We use Islamist terrorist events in the West and changes in the workforce composition within German workplaces as an example to test our theoretical presumptions. Applying a big-data approach, combining large linked employer-employee data (1999-2019) with archival newspaper data, and the Global terrorism database, we show that periods of multiple Islamist terrorist events and high salience of the topic of Islamist terrorism decrease the employment of male employees with Middle Eastern origin, signaled through their names, within workplaces. This discovery is mainly driven by smaller workplaces that do not implement organizational features restricting discriminatory behavior, such as formalized hiring processes or shop-floor worker representation.