UC Berkeley

This dissertation consists of three essays examining ascriptive inequality in the labor market. In the first two essays, I draw on an original, two-wave experiment with a sample of white hiring agents to advance the sociological understanding of the determinants of employers’ discriminatory behavior and the consequences of jobseekers’ racially-segregated networks. First, I examine what motivates employers to discriminate. I find implicit (largely unconscious), but not explicit, racial attitudes predict employers’ evaluations of white applicants, and of black applicants relative to white applicants. Thus, instead of deliberately rejecting black jobseekers, hiring agents’ behavior appears to be driven by largely unconscious biases. Further, in open-ended responses, hiring agents justify their racially-motivated evaluations without invoking race, suggesting the ambiguity of the hiring process enables them to maintain and portray an egalitarian image. Second, I analyze how white hiring agents reward employee referrals. I find that in the most prevalent real-life conditions—black applicants referred by black employees, and white applicants referred by white employees—black applicants’ referrals were significantly discounted relative to white applicants’ referrals. Indeed, black applicants only benefited from having a referral when two conditions were met: the referring employee was white and the hiring agent was relatively low-prejudiced. Thus, in addition to their disadvantage in access to employee referrals, black jobseekers suffer from a disadvantage in returns to these referrals. In the third essay, I use the rich week-by-week measures of work experiences from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to examine the role of labor market experiences—specifically, employment histories—in explaining the intergenerational transmission of economic status. I document a strong association between parental income and employment histories for men without a college degree. Among this group, men from higher-income families accumulate more work experience and tenure, and less unemployment, throughout their careers than men from lower-income families. In contrast, regardless of parental income, college graduates quickly settle into stable, long-term employment. Thus, a college degree appears to be a powerful resource that leaves little room for family background effects on employment histories. Consequently, for non-college graduates (but not for college graduates), employment histories mediate approximately one-third of the effect of parental income on earnings. Ultimately, these essays highlight the enduring effect of race and family background in the labor market.