Blacklists
Destigmatization and Its Imbalanced Effects in Labor Markets
Giacomo Negro et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Destigmatization is an understudied social process in which the negative outcomes for a previously stigmatized group improve. We theorize that during a period of destigmatization, the effects of stigma persist more strongly for people stigmatized by association than for those directly stigmatized. We propose that this occurs because, during periods of destigmatization, conscious prejudice has diminished but nonconscious prejudice remains, so people correct for their explicit biases toward individuals with the stigmatizing trait but are unaware of their ongoing implicit prejudice toward those stigmatized by association. Our evidence comes from archival data on individual employment in film during the cold war years in Hollywood. It shows that as the stigma of being on an anticommunist blacklist weakened, the employment penalty for being a coworker of a blacklisted artist was greater than the penalty for actually having been on the blacklist itself. A supplemental experiment, designed to address the limitations of archival data, shows the same imbalanced employment penalties in another stigma currently undergoing destigmatization (that of physical disability). Paradoxically, as stigmas recede, harmful effects persist more for associates of stigmatized individuals than for the stigmatized themselves.
Diverging Disparities: Race, Parental Income, and Children’s Math Scores, 1960 to 2009
Jordan Conwell
Sociology of Education, April 2021, Pages 124-142
Abstract:
In recent decades, the black–white test score disparity has decreased, and the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends: black and white students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same income or race within income). To do so, I draw on three nationally representative data sets on 9th or 10th graders, covering 1960 to 2009, that contain information on students’ math test scores. I find that math test score disparities between black and white students with same-income parents are to black students’ disadvantage. Although these disparities have decreased since 1960, in 2009 they remained substantively large, statistically significant, and largest between children of the highest-income parents. Furthermore, family and school characteristics that scholars commonly use to explain test score disparities by race or income account for markedly decreasing shares of race-within-income disparities over time. The study integrates the literatures on test score disparities by race and income with attention to the historical and continued structural influence of race, net of parental income, on students’ educational experiences and test score outcomes.
Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Midlife
Jordan Conwell & Natasha Quadlin
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates White, Black, and Hispanic men’s and women’s access and midlife labor market returns to college quality. To do so, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), merged with college quality information from the Barron’s Admissions Competitiveness Index. Although prior research has investigated similar dynamics in access and returns to higher education, this work typically excludes Hispanics and does not assess enrollments at community colleges and other less competitive colleges where Black and Hispanic enrollments tend to cluster. We find that Black–White and Hispanic–White differences in college quality, to Whites’ advantage, were fully explained or reversed once we accounted for differences in students’ backgrounds. At midlife, Hispanic and especially Black men had lower rates of labor force participation than White men who attended colleges of the same quality. Including such differences (i.e., years of no or part-time work) in assessing the earnings returns to college quality demonstrated striking disadvantages facing college-educated Black men relative to White men, which were not fully accounted for by background characteristics. Employment and earnings returns to college quality were not as disparate by race for women. Relative to White women, we find earnings advantages for Hispanic women among those who attended community colleges. This article demonstrates the utility of taking an intersectional and life course approach to the study of higher education and the economic returns to schooling.
Human Capital and Black-White Earnings Gaps, 1966-2017
Owen Thompson
NBER Working Paper, March 2021
Abstract:
This paper estimates the contribution of human capital, measured using both educational attainment and test performance, to the Black-white earnings gap in three separate samples of men spanning 1966 through 2017. There are three main findings. First, the magnitude of reductions in the Black-white earnings gap that occur after controlling for human capital have become much larger over time, suggesting a growing contribution of human capital to Black-white earnings disparities. Second, these increases are almost entirely due to growth in the returns to human capital, rather than changing racial gaps in the human capital traits themselves. Finally, growth in the explanatory power of human capital has been primarily due to increases in the association between human capital and the likelihood of non-work, with no clear increases in the extent to which human capital explains Black-white differences in hourly wages or other intensive margins. These findings highlight how apparently race-neutral structural developments in the US labor market, such as increasing skill prices and falling labor force participation rates among less skilled men, have had large impacts on the dynamics of racial inequality.
Measuring and calibrating the racial/ethnic densities of executives in US publicly traded companies
Jeremiah Green & John Hand
University of North Carolina Working Paper, March 2021
Abstract:
We measure the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of executives in a random sample of 523 US publicly traded companies and the S&P 500®. When we calibrate the RAEDs of executives as a whole against the RAEDs of the 2019 US population, we find that American Indians/Alaska Natives, Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented and Whites are overrepresented. However, when we calibrate executive RAEDs against a benchmark that seeks to take into account key features of the demand for and supply of proto-executive talent, namely the RAEDs of the cohorts of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the broad New York Times 2017 list of the top 100 US four-year colleges and universities, matched to executives’ BA/BS graduation years, mostly different and at times opposite findings obtain. For example, for executives as a whole in S&P 500® firms, Blacks and Hispanics are overdense relative to their top-bachelor’s-qualified benchmark RAEDs while Whites are underdense. For CEOs in S&P 500® firms, Blacks are underdense while Asians/Pacific Islanders, Hispanics and Whites are at their top-bachelor’s-qualified benchmark expected densities. We conclude that because the sign and magnitude of a deviation from a racial/ethnic benchmark can influence the inferences that are made and policies that are proposed with regard to the presence and/or magnitude of racial bias or discrimination, the choice of benchmark against which executive RAEDs are calibrated is an overlooked but highly important one.
A Randomized Study to Assess the Effect of Including the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Results on Reviewers Scores for Underrepresented Minorities
Kristina Dang et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Whether requiring Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) results for PhD applicants affects the diversity of admitted cohorts remains uncertain. This study randomized applications to two population health University of California San Francisco PhD programs to assess whether masking reviewers to applicant GRE results differentially affects reviewers’ scores for underrepresented minorities (URM) applicants from 2018-2020. Applications with GRE results and those without were randomly assigned to reviewers to designate scores for each copy (1-10, 1 being best). URM was defined as self-identification as African American/Black, Filipino, Hmong, Vietnamese, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American/Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. We used linear mixed models with random effects for applicant and fixed effects for each reviewer to evaluate the effect of masking the GRE results on the overall application score and whether this effect differed by URM status. Reviewer scores did not significantly differ for unmasked versus masked applications among non-URM applicants (b=0.15; 95% CI: [-0.03, 0.33]) or URM applicants (b=0.02, 95% CI: [-0.36, 0.40]). We did not find evidence that removing GREs differentially affected URM compared to non-URM students (b for interaction= -0.13, 95% CI: [-0.55, 0.29]). Within these doctoral programs, results indicate that GRE scores do not harm nor help URM applicants.
Workplace Backlash? Workforce Diversity and Dominant Group Attraction to Pro-Diversity Claims
Reuben Hurst
University of Michigan Working Paper, February 2021
Abstract:
Amidst growing workforce diversity, firms increasingly make pro-diversity claims when recruiting. This paper examines whether, for workers from historically dominant groups, perceptions of growing workforce diversity decrease attraction to firms that make pro-diversity claims. In a pre-registered survey experiment, approximately 3,000 white Americans were most attracted to a non-discrimination claim and more attracted to a pro-diversity claim than a company description that made no mention of diversity. Among non-bachelor's-holding subjects, information illustrating growing workforce diversity significantly decreased attraction to the pro-diversity claim. These findings demonstrate one way in which the well-documented relationship between growing diversity and increasingly exclusionary political preferences extends to workplace preferences. They imply that firms reliant on non-bachelor's-holding white workers may face an increasingly stark trade-off between using worker-of-color-attracting pro-diversity claims or white-worker-attracting non-discrimination claims. I discuss the strategic challenges created by far-reaching shifts in workplace preferences as well as the under-acknowledged role of human capital strategy in shaping the broader social environment.
Does student-teacher race match affect course grades?
Erica Harbatkin
Economics of Education Review, April 2021
Abstract:
A growing body of research has found that student-teacher race match is associated with higher test scores, teacher expectations, and teacher perceptions of students. This paper contributes to the student-teacher race match literature by investigating the effect of race match on course grades. To the extent that race match is associated with higher course grades for minority students, a more diverse teacher workforce is one mechanism that may help to narrow the achievement gap. Using a series of fixed effects models exploiting within-student variation across year and subject matter, I find that having a race-matched teacher is associated with a small but significant increase in course grade, on average. The positive effect of race match is driven largely by the experience of Black students.
Minority Analysts, Diversity, and Market Behavior
Paul Borochin, Vidhi Chhaochharia & Alok Kumar
University of Miami Working Paper, January 2021
Abstract:
This study examines whether race/ethnicity of financial intermediaries influences the production and dissemination of information in the U.S. capital markets. We find that brokerage diversity influences both the forecasting style and accuracy of analysts. Asian analysts are more likely to issue bold positive forecasts while African American and Hispanic analysts are relatively more pessimistic. Further, White (Asian) analysts are more (less) accurate while African American and Hispanic analysts are as accurate as their peers. These accuracy differences primarily reflect the effects of brokerage diversity. Stock market participants perceive Asian analysts relatively more favorably in spite of their lower accuracy but their career outcomes are adversely affected by increased diversity. In contrast, stock market participants perceive African American and Hispanic analysts relatively less favorably and their career outcomes are minimally affected by brokerage diversity. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that minority analysts do not benefit from increased diversity while White analysts do.
The Role of College-Bound Friends in College Enrollment Decisions by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
Steven Elías Alvarado
American Educational Research Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the association between college-bound friends and college enrollment using restricted transcript data from the High School Longitudinal Study. Propensity score matching and school fixed effects models suggest that having close college-bound friends is positively associated with enrolling in college. However, Black and Latino male students are much less likely to benefit from having college-bound friends than others, suggesting that structural and cultural factors that are tied to race, ethnicity, and gender may limit the beneficial potential of friends, especially for these male Black and Latino students. Implications for addressing racial and ethnic disparities in college enrollment and for the role of friends in college enrollment decisions are discussed.