Profiling in Courage
Strike Three: Umpires' Demand for Discrimination
Christopher Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael Yates & Daniel Hamermesh
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment (e.g., fastballs over home plate) when they anticipate bias. These direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward. The results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups' behavior generally. They imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination.
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Thomas Craemer
Public Administration Review, May/June 2010, Pages 367-377
Abstract:
Are charges of racial disparities in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's relief efforts in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina accurate? Limited publicly available data on trailer distribution in New Orleans are compared to an on-site trailer count and to a complete trailer count from aerial photographs of New Orleans. The Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish (98 percent Black prior to Hurricane Katrina) had significantly fewer trailers than neighboring Arabi in St. Bernard Parish (95 percent White prior to Hurricane Katrina). To control for administrative differences between parishes and socioeconomic factors, two affluent neighborhoods within Orleans Parish, Pontchartrain Park (97 percent Black prior to Hurricane Katrina) and Lakeview (94 percent White prior to Hurricane Katrina), are compared. The conclusion: racial discrepancies remain large and substantial. A number of hypotheses are developed and the implications discussed.
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Do Black Mayors Improve Black Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large U.S. Cities
John Nye, Ilia Rainer & Thomas Stratmann
George Mason University Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities' mayors between 1971 and 2003. We find that black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture the causal effects of black mayors. We also find that the effect of black mayors on black employment outcomes is stronger in cities that have a large black community. This suggests that electoral incentives may be an important determinant of racial favoritism. Finally, we also find that, corresponding to increases in employment, black income is higher after black mayors take office. Again, this effect is pronounced in cities with a large black population.
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Muslim Discrimination: Evidence From Two Lost-Letter Experiments
Ali Ahmed
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, April 2010, Pages 888-898
Abstract:
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there has been considerable concern about whether Muslims living in Western countries are targets of prejudice. A considerable amount of survey-based evidence suggests that Muslims are victims of discrimination. This paper tested this hypothesis. Two lost-letter experiments were conducted to test whether the difference in returned letters would be attributable to whether the addressee was Muslim or Swedish. The results show that Muslims receive far fewer letters than do Swedes. However, this discrimination only appears when the lost letters contain money; in which case, the finder gains by not posting the letter.
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Black Power, Soft Power: Floyd McKissick, Soul City, and the Death of Moderate Black Republicanism
Devin Fergus
Journal of Policy History, Spring 2010, Pages 148-192
"A trend that was decades in the making, political experts and historians typically locate the end of GOP courtship of black America between 1964 and 1980. However, the dawn of the 1970s seemed to portend the most promising moment for black-GOP relations. At the beginning of its first term, the Nixon administration decided to back the new town of Soul City, North Carolina, the largest publicly financed project ever underwritten for an African American developer, according to press releases. The White House's 'soft power' rapprochement toward black power militant and town founding father Floyd McKissick caught even Nixon's most ubiquitous civil rights critics off guard. 'I can't imagine this administration doing anything as positive as Soul City,' NAACP's stunned executive director Roy Wilkins wrote to McKissick."
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Arnold Ho, Lotte Thomsen & Jim Sidanius
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, February 2009, Pages 389-406
Abstract:
Despite the fact that few people appear to endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks, such stereotypes are widely disseminated in our culture. Consequently, such stereotypes can have pervasive consequences on one's impressions of African Americans, even by low-prejudice Whites and by Blacks themselves. Thus, we predicted that student judgments of intellectual competence would be more important when students were making global performance evaluations of Black faculty than of White faculty. Furthermore, to the extent that intellectual competence is more salient in the judgment of Black faculty, such judgments should be essentially the same among Black and White students, and for low- and high-prejudice students. For the most part, analyses of instructor evaluations at a major American university supported these expectations.
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Attitudes toward Highly Skilled and Low-skilled Immigration: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
Jens Hainmueller & Michael Hiscox
American Political Science Review, February 2010, Pages 61-84
Abstract:
Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own. We find instead that both low-skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low-skilled immigrants, and this preference is not decreasing in natives' skill levels. The fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low-skilled immigration more than poor natives, and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure (in terms of immigrant access to public services). We find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low-skilled immigration in general. In states with high fiscal exposure, poor (rich) natives are more (less) opposed to low-skilled immigration than they are elsewhere. This indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes. Overall the results suggest that economic self-interest, at least as currently theorized, does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration. The results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration.
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Latino Representation on Congressional Websites
Walter Wilson
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2009, Pages 427-448
Abstract:
Do Latino representatives enhance or "enlarge" Latino representation (Walsh 2002)? I examined the content of websites posted by members of the 110th Congress and found that the websites of Latino representatives are not more accessible to Spanish-speaking users than the websites of non-Latino representatives, nor are the sites more likely to exhibit pro-immigrant positions or offer immigration assistance. The websites of Latino representatives are, however, more likely to present Latino perspectives. Latino representatives enhance Latino representation in this forum by enlarging or broadening the presence of a Latino voice in policy discussion.
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Orit Tykocinski & Liad Bareket-Bojmel
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, January 2009, Pages 62-81
Abstract:
The effectiveness of the "lost e-mail technique" (LET) as an unobtrusive attitude measure was successfully demonstrated in 2 studies. In Study 1, we found that Israeli students were more likely to reply to a similar other than to a minority group member (an Israeli-Arab or an immigrant from the former Soviet Union). In Study 2, LET was administered to professors and administrators, and its effectiveness was compared to a more traditional self-report measure. Although professors showed less discrimination on the self-report measure than did administrators, they were nevertheless discriminative in their responses to lost e-mails. These results suggest that professors are not necessarily less prejudiced, but probably are better able to detect attitude probes and more motivated to appear unbiased.
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Lyna Wiggins, Lia Nower, Raymond Sanchez Mayers & Andrew Peterson
Journal of Community Psychology, May 2010, Pages 486-496
Abstract:
This study examines the density of lottery outlets within ethnically concentrated neighborhoods in Middlesex County, New Jersey, using geospatial statistical analyses. No prior studies have empirically examined the relationship between lottery outlet density and population demographics. Results indicate that lottery outlets were not randomly dispersed across the county but rather were significantly clustered in some census tracts. Using geospatial statistical analysis, percent poverty was found to be negatively related to the density of lottery outlets, while percent commercial use was highly positively related. Percent Hispanic was strongly significant in all the models predicting lottery outlet density and had the highest explanatory power other than percent commercial. Other independent variables, including median household income and race (African American and White) were not found to be significant predictors of lottery outlet density. Implications for policy and research are discussed.
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Immigrants' Life Satisfaction in Europe: Between Assimilation and Discrimination
Mirna Safi
European Sociological Review, April 2010, Pages 159-176
Abstract:
Using data from the three rounds of the European Social Survey, this article investigates the disparities in life satisfaction measures between the first- and second-generation immigrants, on the one hand, and the natives, on the other hand, in 13 European countries. Two major theoretical hypotheses explaining the lower level of immigrants' subjective well-being are tested: the straight line assimilation and the effect of discrimination. The main finding is that immigrants' relative dissatisfaction does not diminish with time and across generations, which refutes the predictions of the assimilation paradigm. However, when ethnic groups are compared, the discrimination some of them perceive in the host society seems to be a more consistent explanation for their lower life satisfaction level. The effect of discrimination is measured with an attempt to correct for the endogeneity bias that it may lead to by using simultaneous regressions with instrumental variables.
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The Impact of 9/11 and the London Bombings on the Employment and Earnings of U.K. Muslims
Faisal Rabby & William Rodgers
Rutgers University Working Paper, February 2010
Abstract:
Using a difference-in-differences framework, this paper estimates the impact that Britain's July 2005 bombings had on the labor market outcomes of UK residents who are either Muslim by religious affiliation or whose nativity profiles are similar to the terrorists. We find a 10 percentage point decrease in the employment of very young Muslim men relative to non-Muslim immigrants after the London bombings. The drop in employment is accompanied by consistent declines in real earnings and hours worked. A weak association between the 9-11 terrorist attacks and a drop in the employment of very young male immigrants from Muslim-majority countries is also found. The terrorist events had little impact on the employment of older men.
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Subtle Bias Against Muslim Job Applicants in Personnel Decisions
Jaihyun Park, Eva Malachi, Orit Sternin & Roni Tevet
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, September 2009, Pages 2174-2190
Abstract:
Contemporary theories of prejudice suggest that racism still exists in society, but is expressed in subtle and justifiable manners. Employing such theoretical frameworks, the present study examined subtle ways in which social category information is used differentially in personnel decisions. Participants (managers or undergraduates) were presented with background information and a résumé (with a typical Muslim or European American name) for a hypothetical job applicant. After reviewing the résumés, participants judged the applicant on hirability, salary assignment, and other job-related characteristics. Results showed that the Muslim applicant, relative to the American, was unfavorably judged in salary assignment and job-related characteristics in the presence of negative information. Both managers and undergraduates exhibited the same bias. Implications of the findings are discussed.
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Aimee Chin & Chinhui Juhn
NBER Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
Ten states, beginning with Texas and California in 2001, have passed laws permitting undocumented students to pay the in-state tuition rate - rather than the more expensive out-of-state tuition rate - at public universities and colleges. We exploit state-time variation in the passage of the laws to evaluate the effects of these laws on the educational outcomes of Hispanic childhood immigrants who are not U.S. citizens. Specifically, through the use of individual-level data from the 2001-2005 American Community Surveys supplemented by the 2000 U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of the laws on the probability of attending college for 18- to 24-year-olds who have a high school degree and the probability of dropping out of high school for 16- to 17-year-olds. We find some evidence suggestive of a positive effect of the laws on the college attendance of older Mexican men, although estimated effects of the laws in general are not significantly different from zero.
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A multilevel model of the effects of equal opportunity climate on job satisfaction in the military
Benjamin Walsh, Russell Matthews, Michael Tuller, Kizzy Parks & Daniel McDonald
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, April 2010, Pages 191-207
Abstract:
To date, minimal work has explored associations between equal opportunity (EO) climate and employee work attitudes, and no known research has investigated the effects of EO climate beyond the individual level. We address these gaps in the literature by testing a multilevel structural equation model in which effects of EO climate are considered at both the individual and unit levels. At the individual level, we predicted that psychological EO climate would be directly associated with job stress and job satisfaction, as well as indirectly related to job satisfaction via stress. In addition, cross-level associations between unit EO climate and job stress and job satisfaction were hypothesized to be mediated by cohesion. Findings supported the proposed model; hypothesized relations were supported at both levels of analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the findings, study limitations, and directions for future EO climate research.
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Kyle Crowder & Liam Downey
American Journal of Sociology, January 2010, Pages 1110-1149
Abstract:
This study combines longitudinal individual‐level data with neighborhood‐ level industrial hazard data to examine the extent and sources of environmental inequality. Results indicate that profound racial and ethnic differences in proximity to industrial pollution persist when differences in individual education, household income, and other microlevel characteristics are controlled. Examination of underlying migration patterns further reveals that black and Latino householders move into neighborhoods with significantly higher hazard levels than do comparable whites and that racial differences in proximity to neighborhood pollution are maintained more by these disparate mobility destinations than by differential effects of pollution on the decision to move.
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Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891-1940
Jeffery Jenkins, Justin Peck & Vesla Weaver
Studies in American Political Development, April 2010, Pages 57-89
Abstract:
Prior analyses of congressional action on the issue of black civil rights have typically examined either of the two major Reconstructions. Our paper attempts to fill the large five-decade black box between the end of the First Reconstruction and the beginning of the Second, routinely skipped over in scholarship on Congress, parties, and racial politics. Using a variety of sources-bill-introduction data, statements by members in the Congressional Record, roll-call votes, and newspaper reports, among others-we challenge the common assumption that civil rights largely disappeared from the congressional agenda between 1891 and 1940, documenting instead the continued contestation over racial issues in Congress. By examining several failed anti-lynching initiatives, this article uncovers a largely untold story about how and when the Republican and Democratic Parties reorganized around race, finding that the realignment began earlier than is commonly understood.
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Identifying the roles of race-based choice and chance in high school friendship network formation
Sergio Currarini, Matthew Jackson & Paolo Pin
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 March 2010, Pages 4857-4861
Abstract:
Homophily, the tendency of people to associate with others similar to themselves, is observed in many social networks, ranging from friendships to marriages to business relationships, and is based on a variety of characteristics, including race, age, gender, religion, and education. We present a technique for distinguishing two primary sources of homophily: biases in the preferences of individuals over the types of their friends and biases in the chances that people meet individuals of other types. We use this technique to analyze racial patterns in friendship networks in a set of American high schools from the Add Health dataset. Biases in preferences and biases in meeting rates are both highly significant in these data, and both types of biases differ significantly across races. Asians and Blacks are biased toward interacting with their own race at rates >7 times higher than Whites, whereas Hispanics exhibit an intermediate bias in meeting opportunities. Asians exhibit the least preference bias, valuing friendships with other types 90% as much as friendships with Asians, whereas Blacks and Hispanics value friendships with other types 55% and 65% as much as same-type friendships, respectively, and Whites fall in between, valuing other-type friendships 75% as much as friendships with Whites. Meetings are significantly more biased in large schools (>1,000 students) than in small schools (<1,000 students), and biases in preferences exhibit some significant variation with the median household income levels in the counties surrounding the schools.