Gender and Racial Discrimination in Hiring Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from a Field Experiment of Accountants, 2018-2020.

In this article, we ask whether macro-level changes during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to changes in the levels of discrimination against women and Black job-seekers at the point of hire. We develop three main hypotheses: that discrimination against women and Black job-seekers due to a reduction in labor demand; that discrimination against women due to the reduced supply of women employees and applicants; and that discrimination against Black job-seekers due to increased attention toward racial inequities associated with the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. We test these hypotheses using a correspondence audit study collected over two periods, before and during the early COVID-19 pandemic, for one professional occupation: accountants.

Labor Force Participation Over the Life Course: The Long-Term Effects of Employment Trajectories on Wages and the Gendered Payoff to Employment.

In this article, we consider how individuals' long-term employment trajectories relate to wage inequality and the gender wage gap in the United States. Using more than 30 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 sample, we identify six employment trajectories for individuals from ages 22 to 50. We find that women across racial/ethnic groups and Black men are more likely than White and Hispanic men to have nonsteady employment trajectories and lower levels of employment throughout their lives, and individuals who have experienced poverty also have heightened risks of intermittent employment.

Are We Providing Enough to Those Who Have Too Little? Measuring Poverty Relief.

This manuscript presents a new measure of safety net program effectiveness-a "poverty relief ratio"-that is based on the estimated relationship between market income and social transfers, and reports the amount of income support provided, relative to the amount required to provide for all low-income households' basic needs. In an important advance over the standard poverty reduction rate measures, the poverty relief ratio preserves the rank order of observations across varying poverty thresholds. In this paper, we introduce this measure and demonstrate its validity by tracking major changes in federal policy, and cross-state variation in safety net programs.

Earnings Equality and Relationship Stability for Same-Sex and Heterosexual Couples.

This paper examines a topic of continuing interest for demographers and sociologists of the family: which factors promote relationship stability among couples. Two competing theories have been highly debated to explain how relative earnings relate to relationship quality and stability. The neoclassical economic theory posits that specialization of home and work duties leads to stability because partners fill complementary roles.