Age and the labor market for Hispanics in the United States

Author / Creator

Lahey, Joanna, author

Available as

Online

Summary

We explore the labor market for Hispanic high school graduates in the United States by age using information from the US Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and three labo...

We explore the labor market for Hispanic high school graduates in the United States by age using information from the US Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and three laboratory experiments. We find, in general, that the differences in outcomes for Hispanic and non-Hispanic high school graduates do not change across the lifecycle. Moving to a laboratory setting, we provided participants with randomized resumes for a clerical position that are on average equivalent except for name and age (as indicated by date of high school graduation). In all three experiments, hypothetical applicants with Hispanic and non-Hispanic names were generally treated the same across the lifecycle by a student population, a population of human resources managers, and a more general population from mTurk. These results stand in contrast to earlier results that find strong differences by age in how resumes with Black and White names are treated.

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