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This paper discusses the factors to consider when designing studies to measure hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants.

The paper builds on academic literature related to hiring discrimination and transgender employment to build a detailed discussion of the numerous factors and issues inherent in hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants. By isolating and describing a number of relevant considerations, the paper aims to act as a guide for future studies to build upon.

Three types of hiring discrimination studies are discussed: correspondence tests, in-person experiments and student cohort experiments. Three main categories of factors relevant to an experiment’s design are then discussed: the legal context, industry/role factors and transgender population-specific factors. A flow-chart detailing the research design decision-making process is provided.

The discussion within this paper will act as a reference and a guide for researchers seeking to address the dearth of empirical studies in the literature. The list is not exhaustive; while a number of factors relevant to transgender-specific studies are identified, there may be more that could affect an experiment's design.

Hiring discrimination against transgender people has been recorded in many surveys, but there is little empirical measurement of this discrimination. To the author's knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the experimental design decisions related to transgender hiring discrimination. In doing so, it provides contributions for two primary audiences: those researching transgender employment issues but who have never conducted a study measuring hiring discrimination; and those who have previously conducted studies on hiring discrimination, but have not done so with reference to transgender job applicants.

In a number of recent multi-billion dollar cases brought against cigarette manufacturers, plaintiffs have in part alleged that the cigarette manufacturers (1) conspired not to compete on the basis of health claims or the introduction of potentially safer cigarettes since the 1950s, and (2) engaged in fraudulent advertising by making implied health claims in advertisements selling ‘low tar’/‘light’ cigarettes. In this type of litigation, defendants’ actions could be due to alleged illegal behaviour as asserted by plaintiffs, or be the result of market forces that may have nothing to do with allegedly inappropriate acts. We examine the economic evidence relating to these allegations, taking into account some of the major influences on cigarette company behaviour. In particular, our analyses show that much of the cigarette manufactures’ behaviour can be explained by Federal Trade Commission and related government actions, rather than conspiracy or fraudulent acts. We find the economic evidence is inconsistent with an effective conspiracy to suppress information on either smoking and health or the development and marketing of potentially safer cigarettes. Regarding ‘lower tar’ and ‘light’ cigarettes, the economic evidence indicates that the cigarette manufacturers responded to government and public health initiatives, and that disclosing more information on smoking compensation earlier than the cigarette companies did would not have had any significant impact on smoking behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the true level of discrimination against openly gay and lesbian applicants in hiring decisions in OECD countries as well as on its determinants.

The author presents an overview of all studies conducted in order to test for discrimination against homosexual applicants in the labor market by the correspondence testing method. Moreover, the author performs a meta-analysis of correspondence tests from 18 separate studies conducted in OECD countries to test sexual orientation discrimination, containing more than 70 estimates of effects and representing a total of more than 50,000 resumes sent to employers. In addition to presenting overall results, the author focus on subgroups of specific correspondence tests in order to highlight the differences across gender, type of jobs, procedure, continent and type of information provided in applications.

The author provides evidence that sexual orientation discrimination occurs in the labor market in OECD countries, such that openly homosexual applicants face similar discrimination as ethnic minority applicants. Discrimination is significantly greater in the selection process for low-skilled than for high-skilled jobs. In the selection process for low-skilled jobs, lesbian candidates face significantly lower discrimination than gays (except in jobs that are considered “women’s” jobs). Discrimination is significantly higher in Europe than in North America. Moreover, the way sexual orientation is signaled may influence the level of discrimination found. Finally, discrimination against homosexual applicants is not only a matter of preferences: providing more positive information in applications significantly reduces the level of discrimination.

This paper offers the first quantitative analysis of sexual orientation discrimination in OECD countries through meta-analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nature of request for information (RFIs) on construction projects by using data analytics to understand the frequency of RFIs, when they occur on projects, and the relationship between project characteristics and frequency of RFIs and between project characteristics and RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic approach using RStudio and Minitab software on 168 construction project cases in Australia and New Zealand involving 1,032,949 correspondences and 53,042 RFI event records made available by Aconex, one of the world largest cloud-based project management platform.

Large and complex projects tend to have significantly larger number of RFI events per day and longer RFI turnaround when compared with smaller and less complex projects. Projects with fewer users per organisation recorded a higher RFI turnaround time when compared with projects with more users per organisation – users mean persons involved in managing the project using the online platform (an index of project complexity). RFIs occur early on less complex projects and occur later on more complex projects.

Benchmarks of RFI incidences and turnaround time have been developed for various project characteristics and, practitioners can use them to monitor the RFI performance of projects. Organisations need to pay greater attention to staffing levels needed to handle RFIs to reduce RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic study of RFI yielded insights for managing RFIs. The findings of previous studies on RFIs are difficult to generalise because they are based on single project case study. The influence of project characteristics on RFI frequency and RFI turnaround time is not yet known.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the deception detection literature that arrives at a different conclusion from the one presented by King and Dunn. Specifically, the authors’ review shows that people can detect deception at significantly above chance accuracy in policing environments. A new paradigm for deception detection is also discussed.

An extensive literature review was conducted.

People can detect deception at levels that exceed chance in a variety of police‐related environments when an ecological approach to detecting deception is adopted.

The authors’ review suggests that it is time for deception detection training and manuals to move away from the demeanor‐based systems that are currently dominant and toward coherence and correspondence‐based systems.

The paper presents a perspective that is different from the one advanced by King and Dunn. It also introduces the ecological detection of deception paradigm to the policing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to use the findings of a correspondence testing in order to assess the hiring effects of foreign-origin and employment status in the French construction sector.

To empirically test these features, the author constructs four applications, each representing a particular profile with respect to ethnic origin and employment status. The author sends 1,204 résumés in reply to 301 job vacancies advertised from mid-April to mid-September 2011 in the Paris area.

While being employed increases the performance for applicants of foreign origin, this is not the case for native applicants. However, the benefit of being employed does not fully overcome the penalty created by foreign origin. Hence, the study does not allow to affirm that employed applicants of foreign origin are less penalized than unemployed ones.

This paper improves the knowledge of the effects of employment status on employability. The quantification of these effects remains an important issue. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time correspondence testing has been used to measure the influence of ethnic origin on employability, conditional on employment status.

When acquiring advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT), the greatest caution should be taken regarding the performance measurement system to be used: the decision regarding new investments should not be conditioned by the excessive use of financial indicators to the detriment of the strategic objectives that motivated the investments. It is intended to analyze the aeronautical sector, for which the purchase of AMT is qualifying criteria, with two intentions: first, to identify the performance measurement systems that are used, and second, to test their correspondence with the objectives that motivated the investments.

A survey of the 20 plants in the population was conducted via a postal questionnaire plus a structured interview. The unit of analysis has been maintained through the triangulation of data sources.

The findings suggest that both financial and non‐financial indicators are used, with the latter gaining predominance over the former on some occasions, even though there is no clear correspondence between strategy and the measurement of performance. In the light of the findings, the question of what inspires a company's performance measurement system is still open, especially in those cases where there is no explicit strategy. With regard to practical implications, what seems to be indispensable is an improvement in the determination of the critical variables that should be used to measure performance.

Being valuable for academics and practitioners, this contribution relies, rather, on the possibility of a logical extrapolation to circumstances where the findings might apply, and researchers can judge whether the particular findings would be valid.

Provides new evidence on the adaptation of the make‐up and combination of the type of performance measures currently used by plants in the aeronautical industry, one of the sectors in which technological innovation is of the utmost importance.

The purpose of this paper is to assess field experiments of labour and product markets that have attached photos to identify applicants (in the case of labour markets) or sellers/crowd funders (in the case of product markets).

The experiments seek to identify the contribution of attractiveness, race/ethnicity, skin colour, sexual orientation or religion to the behaviour of agents in markets. These experiments attach photos to CV to signal attractiveness, or the basis of being tested such as race/ethnicity, skin colour or religion.

Many experiments report significant findings for the impact of attractiveness or the identity revealed on positive callbacks to applicants.

The issue considered here, however, is to what extent it is attractiveness or other perceived characteristics that may have had an impact on the behaviour recorded in the experiments. The results of the studies covered in this paper, to a lesser extent those of Weichselbaumer (2004) and Baert (2017), are compromised by including photos, with the possibility the responses received were influenced not only by the basis being tested such as attractiveness, race/ethnicity or religion but by some other characteristic unintended by the researcher but conveyed by the photo.

There is evidence in the experimental work of a range of characteristics that photos convey of individuals and their impact on labour and product market outcomes such as success in obtaining a positive response to job applications and success in obtaining funding to finance projects in the product market. Suggestions are made for future experiments: evaluation of photos for a range of characteristics; use of a “no photo” application together with the photo applications; and evaluation of responses for any bias from unobservable characteristics using Neumark (2012).

This paper discusses for the first time three questions with some tentative answers. First, the researcher faces introducing further unobservable characteristics by using photos. Second, the researcher cannot fully control the experimental approach when using photos. Third, the researcher is able to accurately evaluate the impact of the photos used on the response/probability of call back. Field experiments using photos need to ensure they do this for the range of factors that have been shown to affect judgments and therefore potentially influence call back response. However, the issue remains whether the researcher has, in fact, identified all potential characteristics conveyed by the photos.