| Topics and Issues | Academic Papers (1) Credit checks for employment (3) Credit scores (37) |
Prof. Barbara Kiviat, an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Sociology, has authored a new paper, The art of deciding with data: evidence from how employers translate credit reports into hiring decisions. The paper was referenced in a recent HuffPost story, Despite A Lack Of Evidence, A Credit Report Can Still Be Used To Deny You A Job by Monica Torres.
According to her Harvard bio, Kiviat
is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. She mostly uses qualitative methods, but also works with survey data and vignette experiments.”
According to the extract of this paper,
About half of US employers consider personal credit history when hiring, a practice that connects individuals’ prospects for employment to their financial pasts. Yet little is known about how employers translate credit reports, complicated financial documents, into hiring decisions. Using interviews with 57 hiring professionals, this paper offers the first in-depth look at how employers move from document to decision. Faced with the context-free numbers of a credit report, and without predictively valid credit scores to fall back on, hiring professionals struggle to make sense of financial data without knowing the details of job candidates’ lives. They therefore reach beyond credit reports, both by inferring events that led to delinquent debt and by testing to see if candidates can offer morally redeeming accounts. A process of moral storytelling re-inflates credit reports with social meaning and prevents people with bad credit from getting jobs. This process carries implications for the reproduction of economic disadvantage since judgments about when it is and is not legitimate to have unpaid debt seem to at least partly depend on social background.
Barbara Kiviat, The art of deciding with data: evidence from how employers translate credit reports into hiring decisions, Socio-Economic Review, Volume 17, Issue 2, April 2019, Pages 283–309, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx030.
Prof. Kiviat has also authored of papers of note for CDIA members:
- Kiviat, Barbara. 2019. “Credit Scoring in the United States.” Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter 21(1):33-42.
- Kiviat, Barbara. 2019. “The Moral Limits of Predictive Practices: The Case of Credit-Based Insurance Scores.” American Sociological Review 84(6):1134–1158.