Home Bias in Online Employment

Abstract

We study the nature of home bias in online employment, wherein the employer prefers workers from his/her own home country. Using a unique large-scale dataset from one of the major online labor platforms, we identify employers’ home bias in their online employment decisions. Moreover, we investigate the cause of employers’ home bias using a quasi-natural experiment wherein the platform introduces a monitoring system to facilitate employers to keep track of workers’ progress in time-based projects. After matching comparable fixed-price projects as a control group using propensity score matching, our difference-in-difference estimations show that the home bias does exist in online employment, and at least 54.0% of home bias is driven by statistical discrimination.