Will job testing harm minority workers?

Will job testing harm minority workers?
David H. Autor, David H. Autor
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Last edited by MARC Bot
December 13, 2020 | History

Will job testing harm minority workers?

"Because minorities typically fare poorly on standardized tests, job testing is thought to pose an equity-efficiency trade-off: testing improves selection but reduces minority hiring. We evaluate this trade-off using data from a national retail firm whose 1,363 stores switched from informal to test-based worker screening. We find that testing yielded more productive hires -- raising median tenure by 10 percent and reducing the frequency of firing for cause. Consistent with prior research, minorities performed significantly worse on the test. Yet, testing had no measurable impact on minority hiring, and productivity gains were uniformly large among minorities and non-minorities. We show formally that these results imply that employers were effectively statistically discriminating prior to the introduction of testing -- that is, their screening practices already accounted for expected productivity differences between applicant groups. Consequently, testing improved selection of both minority and non-minority applicants, but did not alter the racial composition of hiring"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Cover of: Will job testing harm minority workers?
Will job testing harm minority workers?
2004, National Bureau of Economic Research
Electronic resource in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 1/14/2005.
Also available in print.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Published in
Cambridge, MA
Series
NBER working paper series ;, working paper 10763, Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;, working paper no. 10763.

Classifications

Library of Congress
HB1

The Physical Object

Format
Electronic resource

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL3476052M
LCCN
2005615509

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December 13, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
March 12, 2010 Edited by WorkBot update details
December 10, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page