Abstract
This special edition of the Review of Black Political Economics provides a contribution to the growing, vital and intellectually rich field of stratification economics. Stratification economics is an emerging field in economics that seeks to expand the boundaries of the analysis of how economists analyze intergroup differences. It examines the competitive, and sometimes collaborative, interplay between members of social groups animated by their collective self-interest to attain or maintain relative group position in a social hierarchy. The collection of articles in this volume span both quantitative and qualitative approaches, geographical distances (Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and the U.S.), types of intergroup disparity (class, race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, and phenotype), and outcomes associated with social stratification (property rights in identity, human capital, financial capital, consumer surplus, health, and labor market outcomes).
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Notes
Indeed, at every level of income, black and Latino households have a mere fraction of the wealth of comparable white households and these disparities grow larger at lower levels of earnings (Tippett et al. 2014).
Field experiments of employment audits provide, perhaps, the most powerful evidence that employer discrimination is a plausible explanation for racial labor market disparity. Two noted audits are those conducted by economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan (2004) in Chicago and sociologist Devah Pager’s (2003) audit study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is a state that outlaws employer use of a criminal record for most jobs, yet, among young males of comparable race, experience, and education, Pager found that audit testers with a criminal record received half as many employment callbacks as testers without a record. Nonetheless, race was found to be more stigmatizing than incarceration. White testers with criminal records had a slightly higher callback rate than black testers without criminal records.
The Bertrand and Mullainathan study avoided the potential criticism that “tester” actors may have inadvertently signaled skills to the employers in a manner that led them to prefer the white applicants by using a “correspondence” study design. They used a double-blind strategy that avoids the use of human “testers” by attaching fictitious names, those with black and those with white sounding names, to similarly credentialed paired resumes. They found that resumes with white sounding names received a 50% higher call back rate than comparably skilled resumes with black sounding names. Perhaps even more telling, the “better” quality resumes with black sounding names received fewer callbacks than “lower” quality resumes with white sounding names.
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Acknowledgments
William Darity, Jr. and Darrick Hamilton would like to acknowledge and thank the Ford Foundation for their generous support while conducting this research.
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Darity, W.A., Hamilton, D. & Stewart, J.B. A Tour de Force in Understanding Intergroup Inequality: An Introduction to Stratification Economics. Rev Black Polit Econ 42, 1–6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-014-9201-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-014-9201-2