I study whether hiring experiences with one minority group affect beliefs about performance and hiring of another minority group. I conduct an online hiring experiment with a geographically representative U.S. sample, where White employers choose to hire between White, Black, and Hispanic workers in a setting with no differences in performance. I vary the groups available for hire to identify differences in beliefs and hiring across groups, and to test for spillovers. I find that Black and Hispanic workers are perceived as lower-performing and are hired less often than White workers. Hiring experience generates positive spillovers from Hispanic to Black workers—employers become more likely to hire Black workers after hiring Hispanic workers—but not vice versa. I provide suggestive evidence that this asymmetry is driven by a more persistent bias against Hispanic workers.
We introduce a novel experimental environment that extends the explore–exploit problem from the canonical bandit framework to resource management. Unlike in bandit models, where the value of exploration is informational, exploration in our setting replenishes a depleting resource: in each round, participants choose between exploiting the current stock—which is halved in the next round—or relocating to reset it to a high or low level. This environment allows us to study systematic deviations from optimal resource management. We show that dynamic programming and the marginal value theorem, despite their different informational and cognitive requirements, converge to the same exploitation threshold, providing a unique benchmark for optimal behavior. In a lab-in-the-field experiment with 384 participants in Bogota, framed as a street-vending task, participants systematically over-exploit: over-exploitation is two to three times as frequent as under-exploitation. Street vendors over-exploit even more than a reference sample and earn about 13% less. Among vendors, messages discouraging over-exploitation increase earnings, consistent with this pattern deviating from optimality
Many university students, particularly those from under-represented and marginalized backgrounds, struggle to persist and thrive in fields where they remain a minority, often due to lower levels of belonging and perceived support. We examine the impacts of a light-touch intervention designed to provide encouragement during academically and emotionally challenging periods of the semester. Randomly selected students received six weekly emails on behalf of their department during the latter half of the Fall 2021 semester. Drawing on insights from social psychology, the emails aimed to foster belonging, self-efficacy, and a growth mindset, while also offering information about support resources. In addition, the emails sent to a subsample of the treated students featured peer role models who recently graduated from the same university, and an encouragement message from them. We find evidence of a positive impact of the encouragement emails on women's academic performance, with the impacts being larger for under-represented minority (URM) women. Our analysis of mechanisms points at improvements in URM women's growth mindset and emotional well-being. These findings highlight the importance of a supportive academic environment in advancing the success of students from under-represented minority groups.
I study the short- and long-term effects of different hiring policies that could be used to incentivize the hiring of Hispanic workers using an online hiring experiment. In particular, I contrast a hiring quota that imposes 50 percent of hired workers to be Hispanic, an “extra-hire” policy that allows employers to hire an extra worker (of any race or ethnicity) if they meet a 50 percent quota of Hispanic workers, and an extreme 100 percent quota that forces employers to only hire Hispanic workers. While the extra-hire and 50 percent quota policies have similar effects on the hiring of Hispanic workers after they are lifted, lasting improvements in beliefs are only observed with the extra-hire policy. The 100 percent quota backfired and increased the hiring gap against Hispanic workers.
Many interventions aimed at diminishing bias against a minority group hinge on improving individuals’ understanding of the skills of minorities (in gender or abstract group settings). Specifically, a growing number of studies test whether providing employers (or CV evaluators) with information about the average productivity of different groups can reduce bias towards certain groups. In this paper, we ask whether part of the observed bias against Black and Hispanic workers is due to the incorrect belief that, while majority and minority groups may be equally productive on average, top workers (the stars) are more likely to be found in the majority (a.k.a. white) group. If this is the case, can correcting these beliefs reduce bias and discrimination against Black and Hispanic workers? Our data so far show that when only white workers of average productivity are available for hire, but minority workers across the productivity distribution can be hired, discrimination against minority workers vanishes. This suggests that employers want to find and hire stars, and they tend to believe that stars are more likely to be found among white workers. When white stars are unavailable on the market, employers turn to minority workers. Motivated by these findings, we test the impact of an information intervention aimed at de-biasing beliefs about the distribution of stars across groups. Our analysis suggests that while the intervention is successful at decreasing bias in beliefs, it proves unsuccessful in decreasing bias in hiring.
While the traditional route to a bachelor’s degree in the US typically involves four years of full-time study and the accumulation of 120 credits, a growing share of students have pursued alternative pathways to earn these credits, including dual credit, advanced placement, and community college transfer. In this study, we employ an online resume evaluation experiment to investigate whether these pathways affect employer evaluations even when applicants hold the same degree and whether different pathways have different impacts. Moreover, we also manipulate whether the resume is accompanied by an academic transcript to investigate whether evaluations respond primarily to the presence of a non-traditional pathway or to the specific details of how credits were earned.