Check All that Apply
Temporal Distance and Discrimination: An Audit Study in Academia
Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola & Dolly Chugh
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Through a field experiment set in academia (with a sample of 6,548 professors), we found that decisions about distant-future events were more likely to generate discrimination against women and minorities (relative to Caucasian males) than were decisions about near-future events. In our study, faculty members received e-mails from fictional prospective doctoral students seeking to schedule a meeting either that day or in 1 week; students' names signaled their race (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese) and gender. When the requests were to meet in 1 week, Caucasian males were granted access to faculty members 26% more often than were women and minorities; also, compared with women and minorities, Caucasian males received more and faster responses. However, these patterns were essentially eliminated when prospective students requested a meeting that same day. Our identification of a temporal discrimination effect is consistent with the predictions of construal-level theory and implies that subtle contextual shifts can alter patterns of race- and gender-based discrimination.
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Race and Pathways to Power in the National Football League
Jomills Henry Braddock, Eryka Smith & Marvin Dawkins
American Behavioral Scientist, May 2012, Pages 711-727
Abstract:
Recent studies have found that African American managers and executives tend to have relatively few opportunities to exercise higher order and reward-relevant job functions such as job authority, job autonomy, and substantive complexity of work. Most of this research has focused on minority access to job authority in mainstream corporate America. The authors focus on a very specific industry - the National Football League (NFL) - to examine minority access to job authority. Using data collected on all active coaches in the NFL between the 2000 and 2006 seasons, this study examines the influence of race on the attainment of job authority in the NFL. Logistic regression analyses reveal significant direct effects of race on being (a) assigned to coach central positions, (b) appointed as offensive or defensive coordinators, and (c) hired as head coaches, net of measured objective qualifications, including experience, leadership, and performance. Thus, race appears to have both direct and indirect effects on access to managerial authority in the NFL.
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Racial Bias in Expert Quality Assessment: A Study of Newspaper Movie Reviews
Lona Fowdur, Vrinda Kadiyali & Jeffrey Prince
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Newspaper critics' movie reviews are often used by potential movie viewers as signals of expert quality assessment. We investigate the existence and revenue impact of racial bias in these reviews. Using an expansive, novel dataset spanning 2003-2007, we find ratings for movies with a black lead actor and all white supporting cast are approximately 6% lower than for other racial compositions. These findings appear consistent with implicit discrimination, and result in an average revenue loss of up to 4%, or $2.57 million, per movie. Robustness checks show it is unlikely these results are driven by unobserved heterogeneity or random correlations.
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The Racial Gap in Education and the Legacy of Slavery
Graziella Bertocchi & Arcangelo Dimico
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout this period, despite evidence of convergence, the racial gap in attainment between blacks and whites has been persistently determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results with 2SLS estimates where slavery is used as an instrument for the initial gap. We address the question of the excludability of slavery by instrumenting it with the share of disembarked slaves from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Using the same approach we also find that income growth is negatively affected by the initial racial gap in education and that slavery affects growth indirectly through this channel.
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Timothy Stanton & Curtis Johnson
Social Science Journal, June 2012, Pages 214-218
Abstract:
This paper investigates differential customer racial reaction to negative and positive publicity related to professional athletes. In terms of negative publicity, it analyzes the effect of mention in the Mitchell Report on the price of baseball cards. In regards to positive publicity, it considers the impact of having been identified as a member of the United States Olympic or national team. After controlling for player productivity with performance statistics, the effects of being mentioned in the Mitchell Report are isolated within regression analysis to draw conclusions concerning customer racial attitudes toward the steroids scandal. Similar analysis is conducted to see the impact of being seen as a baseball representative of the United States. Regression results are consistent with the conclusion that negative publicity devalues the cards of non-White players but not of White players. Positive publicity, however, increases the value of a player's card regardless of ethnicity.
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Discrimination, technology and unemployment
Luca Paolo Merlino
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
I study the interaction between discrimination and investment using a directed search model where firms decide the capital intensity of their production technologies before being matched. Discrimination makes some workers cheap to hire. As a consequence, some firms might save on capital costs adopting labour intensive technologies. This framework allows to reconcile search models with three well-known facts regarding the labour market outcomes of minority workers: low wages, high unemployment and occupational segregation. Furthermore, the model questions the role of equal pay legislation in reducing inequality since removing this restriction, i.e., allowing firms to post type-contingent wages, eliminates the negative effects of discrimination on investment and wages.
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Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States
Jake Rosenfeld & Meredith Kleykamp
American Journal of Sociology, March 2012, Pages 1460-1502
Abstract:
Why have African-American private-sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades, and how has private-sector union decline exacerbated black-white wage inequality? Using data from the Current Population Survey (1973-2007), the authors show that African-Americans join unions for protection against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors. A model-predicted wage series also shows that, among women, black-white weekly wage gaps would be between 13% and 30% lower if union representation remained at high levels. The effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality for men is less substantial, but without deunionization, weekly wages for black men would be an estimated $49 higher. The results recast organized labor as an institution vital for its economic inclusion of African-American men and women. This study points to the need to move beyond class-based analyses of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions once played in mitigating racial inequality.
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Monetary Tightening and the Dynamics of US Race and Gender Stratification
Stephanie Seguino & James Heintz
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2012, Pages 603-638
Abstract:
This article explores the race and gender effects of monetary tightening in the US from 1979-2008 using state-level panel data. Results indicate the costs of fighting inflation are unevenly distributed amongst workers, weighing more heavily on black females and black males, followed by white females, and lastly white males. We also find evidence that the relative unemployment costs of monetary tightening for subordinate groups vary with the black share of the population.
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Julie Park
American Educational Research Journal, August 2012, Pages 624-650
Abstract:
Ethnic economies promote interclass contact among East Asian Americans, which facilitates the exchange of information and resources through social capital networks. However, low-income Korean Americans are more likely than low-income Chinese Americans to take SAT prep, although both communities have extensive ethnic economies. In the analysis of a national dataset of first-year college students, religious affiliation and religious service attendance were positively associated with SAT prep for Korean Americans, while low socioeconomic status and lack of citizenship discouraged participation for Chinese Americans. I argue that immigrant churches facilitate interclass contact for Korean Americans, which encourages the flow of information around educational resources. Findings demonstrate how what is often stereotyped as "Asian culture" is in reality shaped by complex structural factors.
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"Unskilled" Workers: Social Skills Stereotypes Affect Evaluations of Biracial Job Applicants
Jessica Remedios, Alison Chasteen & Elvina Oey
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, May/June 2012, Pages 204-211
Abstract:
Why do Black/White workers earn wages similar to Black workers ($6.30 less per hour than White workers), despite encountering less negative, anti-Black sentiment from others? We propose that Black/White workers must contend with stereotypes suggesting that biracial people are socially unskilled. In the present study we observed that, regardless of whether job candidates were rejected for external reasons (interviewer prejudice) or whether candidates acted in undesirable ways (claimed discrimination), participants rated Black/White applicants as less socially skilled and as more likely to have demonstrated poor interview skills than Black applicants. Implications for biases against hiring biracial people are discussed.
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ChangHwan Kim & Christopher Tamborini
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Few studies have considered how earnings inequality estimates may be affected by measurement error in self-reported earnings in surveys. Utilizing restricted-use data that links workers in the Survey of Income and Program Participation with their W-2 earnings records, we examine the effect of measurement error on estimates of racial earnings inequality. Results show that varying levels of mean-reverting error causes underestimation of earnings inequality. Notably, mean reversion is steeper for Black men than for White men, bringing about substantial downward bias in the estimated earnings gaps between Whites and Blacks at lower percentiles as well as large underestimation of within-racial group inequality for Black men. Together, our results call attention to the potential distortions generated by systematic measurement error on economic inequality estimates.
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Affirmative Action and the Occupational Advancement of Minorities and Women During 1973-2003
Fidan Ana Kurtulus
Industrial Relations, April 2012, Pages 213-246
Abstract:
The share of minorities and women comprising high-paying skilled occupations such as management, professional, and technical occupations has been increasing since the 1960s, while the proportion of white men in such occupations has been declining. What has been the contribution of affirmative action to the occupational advancement of minorities and women from low-wage unskilled occupations into high-wage skilled ones in U.S. firms? I examine this by comparing the occupational position of minorities and women at firms holding federal contracts, and thereby mandated to implement affirmative action, and noncontracting firms, over the course of 31 years during 1973-2003. I use a new longitudinal dataset of over 100,000 large private-sector firms across all industries and regions uniquely suited for the exploration of this question obtained from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. My key findings show that the share of minorities and women in high-paying skilled occupations grew more at federal contractors subject to affirmative action obligation than at noncontracting firms during the three decades under study, but these advances took place primarily during the pre- and early Reagan years and during the decade following the Glass Ceiling Act of 1991.
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Hispanics in Higher Education and the Texas Top 10% Law
Angel Harris & Marta Tienda
Race and Social Problems, April 2012, Pages 57-67
Abstract:
This paper examines the consequences of changes in Hispanic college enrollment after affirmative action was banned and replaced by an admission guarantee for students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class. We use administrative data on applicants, admittees, and enrollees from the two most selective public institutions and Texas Education Agency data about high schools to evaluate whether and how application, admission, and enrollment rates changed under the three admission regimes. Despite popular claims that the top 10% law has restored diversity to Texas's public flagships, our analyses that account for secular changes in the size of graduation cohorts show that Hispanics are more disadvantaged relative to whites under the top 10% admission regime at both University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. Simulations of Hispanics' gains and losses at each stage of the college pipeline reveal that affirmative action is the most efficient policy to diversify college campuses, even in highly segregated states like Texas.
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Andrew Francis & Maria Tannuri-Pianto
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2012, Pages 754-784
Abstract:
In 2004, the University of Brasilia established racial quotas. We find that quotas raised the proportion of black students, and that displacing applicants were from lower socioeconomic status families than displaced applicants. The evidence suggests that racial quotas did not reduce the preuniversity effort of applicants or students. Additionally, there may have been modest racial disparities in college academic performance among students in selective departments, though the policy did not impact these. The findings also suggest that racial quotas induced some individuals to misrepresent their racial identity but inspired other individuals, especially the darkest-skinned, to consider themselves black.
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The Consequences of Chronic Stereotype Threat: Domain Disidentification and Abandonment
Anna Woodcock et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stereotype threat impairs performance across many domains. Despite a wealth of research, the long-term consequences of chronic stereotype threat have received little empirical attention. Beyond the immediate impact on performance, the experience of chronic stereotype threat is hypothesized to lead to domain disidentification and eventual domain abandonment. Stereotype threat is 1 explanation why African Americans and Hispanic/Latino(a)s "leak" from each juncture of the academic scientific pipeline in disproportionately greater numbers than their White and Asian counterparts. Using structural equation modeling, we tested the stereotype threat-disidentification hypothesis across 3 academic years with a national longitudinal panel of undergraduate minority science students. Experience of stereotype threat was associated with scientific disidentification, which in turn predicted a significant decline in the intention to pursue a scientific career. Race/ethnicity moderated this effect, whereby the effect was evident for Hispanic/Latino(a) students but not for all African American students. We discuss findings in terms of understanding chronic stereotype threat.
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Institutional Variation in the Promotion of Racial/Ethnic Minority Faculty at US Medical Schools
Marcella Nunez-Smith et al.
American Journal of Public Health, May 2012, Pages 852-858
Objectives: We compared faculty promotion rates by race/ethnicity across US academic medical centers.
Methods: We used the Association of American Medical College's 1983 through 2000 faculty roster data to estimate median institution-specific promotion rates for assistant professor to associate professor and for associate professor to full professor. In unadjusted analyses, we compared medians for Hispanic and Black with White faculty using the Wilcoxon rank sum test. We compared institution-specific promotion rates between racial/ethnic groups with data stratified by institutional characteristic (institution size, proportion racial/ethnic minority faculty, and proportion women faculty) using the χ2 test. Our sample included 128 academic medical centers and 88 432 unique faculty.
Results: The median institution-specific promotion rates for White, Hispanic, and Black faculty, respectively, were 30.2%, 23.5%, and 18.8% (P < .01) from assistant to associate professor and 31.5%, 25.0%, and 16.7% (P < .01) from associate to full professor.
Conclusions: At most academic medical centers, promotion rates for Hispanic and Black were lower than those for White faculty. Equitable faculty promotion rates may reflect institutional climates that support the successful development of racial/ethnic minority trainees, ultimately improving healthcare access and quality for all patients.
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Suffrage, Schooling, and Sorting in the Post-Bellum U.S. South
Suresh Naidu
NBER Working Paper, June 2012
Abstract:
This paper estimates the political and economic effects of the 19th century disenfranchisement of black citizens in the U.S. South. Using adjacent county-pairs that straddle state boundaries, I examine the effect of voting restrictions on political competition, public goods, and factor markets. I find that poll taxes and literacy tests each lowered overall electoral turnout by 8-22% and increased the Democratic vote share in elections by 1-7%. Employing newly collected data on schooling inputs, I show that disenfranchisement reduced the teacher-child ratio in black schools by 10-23%, with no significant effects on white teacher-child ratios. I develop a model of suffrage restriction and redistribution in a 2-factor economy with migration and agricultural production to generate sufficient statistics for welfare analysis of the incidence of black disenfranchisement. Consistent with the model, disenfranchised counties experienced a 3.5% increase in farm values per acre, despite a 4% fall in the black population. The estimated factor market responses suggest that black labor bore a collective loss from disenfranchisement equivalent to at least 15% of annual income, with landowners experiencing a 12% gain.
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Sean Reardon et al.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate whether the school desegregation produced by court-ordered desegregation plans persists when school districts are released from court oversight. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009. We find that racial school segregation in these districts increased gradually following release from court order, relative to the trends in segregation in districts remaining under court order. These increases are more pronounced in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where prerelease school segregation levels were low. These results suggest that court-ordered desegregation plans are effective in reducing racial school segregation, but that their effects fade over time in the absence of continued court oversight.
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Implicit racial prejudice against African-Americans in balanced scorecard performance evaluations
David Upton & Edward Arrington
Critical Perspectives on Accounting, June 2012, Pages 281-297
Abstract:
A dominant theme in critical accounting theory concerns the relation between human identities and accounting discourse and practices. Though this theme has strong antecedents in Marxist-inspired critique of ideology, research into this theme has employed diverse approaches; among them, genealogical studies (e.g., Miller and O'Leary, 1987), deconstructive studies (e.g., Shearer and Arrington, 1993), psychoanalytic studies and critical-rational studies (e.g., Power and Laughlin, 1996). We offer a different approach grounded in social-cognitive concerns with how implicit attitudes about race influence evaluation of others. We report on the results of an empirical, lab-based study of balanced scorecard evaluations and bonus allocations where race is a treatment effect and where the well-established tenets of Implicit Association Testing (IAT) are used to reveal that there are, indeed, propensities to unwillingly let racial prejudice intervene into our accounting-based evaluations of others. That intervention influences identity in ways that are morally unacceptable, degrading to black workers, and loaded with potential for negative material consequences for workers (e.g., less compensation due to racially determined and irrational performance evaluations). The paper illustrates one area of research in which methodologies adapted from conventional empirical, statistical approaches can enhance the emancipatory potential of critical accounting research.
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Public perceptions on paying student athletes
Michael Mondello et al.
Sport in Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
The notion of paying collegiate athletes has been contested and debated for years. Recently, however, several high-profile cases have once again generated negative headlines and as such, discussions of paying student athletes have proliferated among the popular press, college administrators, players themselves, the general public and sport management scholars. The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast the opinions of a nationally recruited sample of respondents to assess their attitudes related to their support of paying student athletes. While the majority of the respondents were congruent in their beliefs with regards to age, sex and level of education, there was a clear difference in respondents' viewpoints based on race. Specifically, Blacks were more than two times as likely as Whites to support payment to student athletes. Findings, implications and suggestions for future research are also examined.
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The Evolving Demographics of the Union Movement
Roland Zullo
Labor Studies Journal, June 2012, Pages 145-162
Abstract:
Trend analyses indicate that the union movement is becoming less white and more female. In this research, the author examines the transitions of persons in and out of the union movement in order to understand whether diversification is due to behavior or structure. Results indicate that African Americans transitioned comparatively faster than others from nonunion to union employment, even after controlling for industry and occupation. Latina/os also display evidence of an above-average preference for union representation, with transitions into unions suppressed by immigrant status. For women, the growing demographic numbers appear to be due to the relative stability of the industry or occupation in which persons are employed. In general, the findings for part-time workers, education, and annual trends point to an increasingly challenging environment for unionizing over the decade.
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Olga Alonso-Villar, Coral Del Rio & Carlos Gradin
Industrial Relations, April 2012, Pages 179-212
Abstract:
This paper studies occupational segregation by ethnicity/race and gender by following a new approach that facilitates multigroup comparisons and econometric analyses to take into account group characteristics. The analysis shows that segregation is particularly intense in the Hispanic and Asian populations (the situation being more severe for the former given its higher concentration in low-paid jobs). A distinctive characteristic of Hispanics is that segregation is higher for men than for women although females are more concentrated in low-paid jobs. Segregation neither for women nor for African and Native Americans is reduced by taking human capital variables into account.
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Workplace Racial Discrimination and Middle Class Vulnerability
Vincent Roscigno, Lisa Williams & Reginald Byron
American Behavioral Scientist, May 2012, Pages 696-710
Abstract:
Middle-class minority workers have skill and human capital credentials which should confer protections and relative workplace power. Moreover, they often work in more bureaucratic contexts where culturally proscribed status markers, such as race, should matter little if at all. In this article, we challenge such assumptions by quantitatively and qualitatively examining several hundred cases of workplace racial discrimination and the degree of middle-class African American vulnerability. Notable are significant levels of firing discrimination for all African American workers and a heightened likelihood of mobility-based discrimination and day-to-day racial harassment for middle-class African Americans. Through qualitative case immersion, we show the core practices and processes through which these patterns manifest.