How do firms adjust their labor demand when a female employee takes temporary leave after childbirth? Using Austrian administrative data, we compare firms with and without a birth event and exploit policy reforms that significantly altered leave durations. We find three main results. First, firms respond primarily through anticipatory hiring, while medium-run effects on total employment and the wage bill are small. Second, these adjustments differ sharply by gender: anticipatory replacement hiring is overwhelmingly female, but firms’ workforce composition shifts toward men in the medium run, driven by the shorter tenure of female new hires and higher retention of male incumbents. Third, while longer leave entitlements substantially extend actual leave absences, we do not find systematic differences in firms’ labor demand responses across leave regimes. Taken together, these findings show that firms accommodate parental leave mainly through anticipatory hiring and gendered changes in workforce composition, with limited medium-run changes in aggregate labor demand even when leave durations differ substantially.

Can generative AI improve hiring? We experimentally embed GPT-4 into a teacher-recruitment screening process in Ghana, comparing three pipelines: human-only evaluation, human with AI assistance, and fully automated screening. Automation increases offer and hiring rates by 84% and 73%, respectively, over the human-only baseline. The key mechanism is grading consistency: human evaluators apply idiosyncratic standards, introducing substantial noise into the screening process, whereas AI applies the grading rubric systematically, producing grades five times more predictive of independent assessments of candidate quality. In contrast, AI assistance yields no improvement, as evaluators systematically ignore AI’s recommendations. Taken together, our results suggest that, at least in this context, automation outperforms human-AI collaboration.

Organizations recruiting for jobs with a social mission must decide what to emphasize when advertising them. In a field experiment with a Ghanaian NGO, we randomly varied whether emails recruiting university graduates into a teaching fellowship emphasized its career benefits or its social impact. The career message increased male application rates by 71% relative to the social-impact message and left female rates unchanged; we reject that men and women responded equally. Suggestive evidence indicates that candidates recruited through the career message were more likely to receive offers and be hired, and that men, but not women, were less prosocial.