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A growing body of sociological research has shown that racial identification is not only fluid, but crucially depends on other individual- and societal-level factors. When such factors are also associated with socioeconomic outcomes such as earnings, estimates of the disadvantage experienced by individuals because of how they identify racially obtained from standard regression models may be biased. We illustrate this potential bias using data from a large-scale survey conducted by the Mexican census bureau. This survey is the first by the government agency since the country’s independence to include a question on black identification. We find evidence of a substantial bias in estimates of racial disadvantage. Results from our initial models treating racial self-identification as an exogenous predictor indicate that black men have higher earnings than non-black men. However, when we use an instrumental variables model that treats racial self-identification as endogenous, that is, as a function of the same unobserved characteristics as individuals’ earnings, we find a significant negative effect of black identification on earnings. While previous studies have acknowledged the endogeneity of race, ours is the first to explicitly model racial self-identification as an endogenous predictor to obtain an unbiased estimate of its effect on individuals’ socioeconomic conditions.

Research indicates that individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and class origins differ in their unemployment rates. We know less, however, about whether these differences result from the differing groups’ unequal hazards of entering or exiting unemployment and even less about how economic fluctuations moderate the ethnoracial and class-origin gaps in the long-term risks of transitioning into and out of unemployment. Using Rounds 1–17 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and event history models, we show that non-Hispanic blacks become more similar to non-Hispanic whites in their paces of entering unemployment as their local unemployment rate rises, perhaps because jobs largely closed to the former are eliminated in a greater proportion during recessions. Nonetheless, blacks’ relatively slow pace of transitioning from unemployment to having a job decelerates further with economic downturns. By contrast, Hispanics’ paces of entering and exiting unemployment relative to non-Hispanic whites hardly change with local unemployment rates, despite unemployed Hispanics’ slower rate of transitioning to having a job. With respect to class origin, we find that the advantages in both unemployment entry and recovery of young men with relatively educated parents diminish with economic deterioration. Based on these results, we suggest that facing economic pressure, employers’ preference for workers of a higher class origin is more malleable than their preference for whites over blacks, making unemployed blacks especially disadvantaged in uncertain economic times. DOI :  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2019.100422

The Economy, the Family, and Working Class Discontent

New appointments, past and upcoming programs

Long Doan along with Faculty Associates Liana Sayer, Sociology, and Jessica Fish, Family Science, will examine the social impacts of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

The tools we have to understand what is happening to the economy are becoming distorted or harder to interpret.

This year’s crabbing season is fraught with difficult choices for the nearly all-foreign-women workers during the pandemic hit

National radio show examines the dilemma faced by African American police officers

Senate proposal pushes potential $10,000 per month economic support, CNBC report says

Melissa Kearney and colleagues offer bi-partisan plan for economic recovery