| "Black unemployment rate is consistently twice that of whites" [0] -- "One common explanation, as William A. Darity Jr. of Duke University told Salon in 2011, is that blacks are “the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there’s a downturn, they’re the first to be released.” A 2010 article testing that “last hired, first fired” hypothesis against panel data from the Current Population Survey (from which the unemployment rate is derived) found considerable support for the “first fired” part but not for the “last hired” part: Blacks are in fact disproportionately likely to lose their jobs as the business cycle weakens" "African-Americans With College Degrees Are Twice As Likely to Be Unemployed as Other Graduates" [1] -- "Schmitt pointed to a series of studies that have in recent years found that when trained sets of black and white testers with identical resumes are sent on interviews, white men with recent criminal histories are far more likely to receive calls back than black men with no criminal record at all." "DiTomaso says the study, like other research, challenges the assumption that opportunity is available to all Americans who equip themselves with the right skills. Private-sector labor data reported to the federal government shows little change in the share of management and executive-level jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities since the 1980s, she said. In fact, in industries that offer workers the best wages, the share of white men in these jobs has actually grown. The researchers behind the center's study of black college graduate employment patterns emphasized the role that the recession has played in dampening every worker's employment prospects. But they concluded that the long-term unemployment crisis among black college graduates ultimately could not be explained without accounting for continuing discrimination against black applicants." "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" [2] -- " We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market." [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-goo... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/african... [2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 |