The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers

Costas Cavounidis, Kevin Lang and Russell Weinstein

The Economic Journal, 2024, vol. 134, issue 658, 485-514

Abstract: African Americans face shorter employment durations than similar Whites. We hypothesise that employers discriminate in acquiring or acting on ability-relevant information. In our model, monitoring Black, but not White, workers is self-sustaining. New Black hires were more likely fired by previous employers after monitoring. This reduces firms’ beliefs about ability, incentivising discriminatory monitoring. We confirm our predictions that layoffs are initially higher for Black than non-Black workers, but that they converge with seniority and decline more with the Armed Forces Qualification Test for Black workers. Two additional predictions, lower lifetime incomes and longer unemployment durations for Black workers, have known empirical support.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uead079 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers (2022)
Working Paper: The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers (2022)
Working Paper: The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:658:p:485-514.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().