The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Tatiana Mocanu for this session, where she will share her work.
Tatiana Mocanu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Columbia University, and a Research Fellow at the RFBerlin Network. Her research lies in labour and public economics, with a focus on the impact of firm practices and policy design on gender and racial inequalities in labour markets.
Event Topic:
Equity and Efficiency Consequences of Racial Quotas in Hiring
Race-based quotas in labor markets are commonly criticized for increasing diversity at the expense of the quality of hired candidates. Yet if hiring absent the quota is suboptimal, due to discrimination or imperfect screening, quotas may improve equity without reducing efficiency. I evaluate this empirically by studying the introduction of racial hiring quotas in Brazil’s public sector and a newly constructed, large-scale dataset covering the complete applicant pools, candidates’ hiring scores, and the hiring decision rule. This allows me to directly identify counterfactual hires who would have been hired absent the quota and marginal hires selected solely due to the quota, moving beyond average comparisons to isolate the quota’s effect at the margin. Exploiting both the difference in exposure across similar federal and state jobs and a discontinuity generated by the allocation rule, I investigate the policy’s effects on employment, earnings, and worker quality. The quota increases non-white applicants’ hiring probability by 13 percentage points, more than closing the pre-existing racial hiring gap. Marginal non-white hires experience wage gains of approximately 100%, primarily by moving out of lower-paying private-sector jobs, while displaced white applicants experience a wage decline of 12%. Despite lower hiring thresholds, I find no evidence of adverse efficiency effects, suggesting that equity gains can be achieved without efficiency losses.
Event Details:
Date: 24 November 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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