Location: Hof van Liere (F. de Tassiszaal + A. Dürerzaal) - Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp
Workshop on Gender and Discrimination
13:00-13:40 Carlo Schwarz: The Effect of Content Moderation on Online and Offline Hate: Evidence from Germany's NetzDG (with Rafael Jiménez Durán and Karsten Müller)
13:40-14:20 Ria Ivandić: Gender Gaps from Labor Market Shocks (with Anne Sophie Lassen)
14:20-15:00 Olivier Marie: Testing for Ethnic Discrimination throughout the Criminal Justice System (with Kyra Hanemaajier and Nadine Ketel)
Workshop paper abstracts
Carlo Schwarz: The Effect of Content Moderation on Online and Offline Hate: Evidence from Germany's NetzDG (with Rafael Jiménez Durán and Karsten Müller)
Abstract: Social media companies are under scrutiny for the prevalence of hateful content on their platforms, but there is scarce empirical evidence of the consequences of regulating such content. We study this question with a particular focus on anti-refugee hate crime in the context of the “Network Enforcement Act” (NetzDG) in Germany, which mandates major social media companies to remove hateful posts within 24 hours. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the law was associated with a 4% reduction in the toxicity of refugee-related tweets by far-right social media users. Further, we show that the NetzDG reduced anti-refugee hate crimes in municipalities with more far-right social media users. The estimates suggest that the NetzDG induced a 0.9 percentage point reduction in anti-refugee incidents for every standard deviation of far-right social media usage. These findings are also confirmed by a synthetic control estimate. Together, these results suggest that online content moderation can curb online hate speech and offline violence.
Ria Ivandić: Gender Gaps from Labour Market Shocks (with Anne Sophie Lassen)
Abstract: Job loss leads to persistent adverse labour market outcomes, but assessments of gender differences in labour market recovery are lacking. We utilize plant closures in Denmark to estimate gender gaps in labour market outcomes and document that women face an increased risk of unemployment and lose a larger share of their earnings in the two years following job displacement. When accounting for observable differences in human capital across men and women, half of the gender gap in unemployment remains. In a standard de- composition framework, we document that childcare imposes an important barrier to women’s labour market recovery regardless of individual characteristics.
Olivier Marie: Testing for Ethnic Discrimination throughout the Criminal Justice System (with Kyra Hanemaajier and Nadine Ketel)
Abstract: The criminal justice system is multi-staged and features several key agents whose decisions can significantly alter the course of individuals passing through it. These decisions could be influenced by the minority status of the suspects, affecting already under-privileged groups in the population. We use very rich data on all stages in the Dutch criminal justice system (victims, crimes and decisions of all agents involved in trial) and document significant disparities by migration background in judicial decisions across all stages. These disparities cannot be fully explained by controlling for a rich set of (legally) relevant case characteristics. We next exploit a sudden shock in salience of Moroccan migration background, to causally estimate discrimination against suspects with a Moroccan migration background. We find that after the shock, sentencing outcomes for this group significantly worsened, increasing the length of prison sentence by 53 percent.
Joel Carr, Public PhD Defence
15:30-16:00 Jury meets
16:00-18:00 Public defence
For more information, contact the organizers: Sunčica Vujić, Elsa Leromain, Joel Carr and Erlin Theunynck