Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Underemployment in the New Economy
In recent years, a phenomenon called "precarious work," which includes underemployment, temporary and contract employment, part-time work, and long-term unemployment, has grown rapidly. While social scientists have begun to address its consequences for employers and employees, important gaps remain. This project examines two central issues. First, using survey- and field-experimental methods, the dissertation examines the impact of precarious employment histories on future employment patterns for individual workers. It also examines how the effects of these employment histories differ across demographic groups. Second, the project explores the consequences of this shift for full-time, permanent employees in organizations that rely on such contingent employees.
Broader Impacts The recent economic downturn has resulted in growing rates of under- and unemployment. Findings from this research may improve our understanding of sectoral and economic change as well as growing income inequality in the U.S. Findings from this research may be of interest to the general public as well as policy efforts designed to create jobs, both permanent and temporary. Findings may also be of interest to employers, for whom downsizing and hiring strategies carry both known and unknown opportunity costs.
The central goal of this project is to understand how histories of underemployment and non-standard employment – part-time work, temporary employment, and skills underemployment – as well as unemployment shape workers’ future labor market opportunities. Secondarily, the project aims to understand how these consequences differ by the race and gender of the worker. There are two primary components of this project – a survey experiment and a field experiment – which will be discussed in turn. We first conducted an internet-based survey experiment with 1,816 hiring decision-makers at U.S.-based firms. Respondents were asked to evaluate experimentally manipulated resumes for an open Accounting Clerk position at their company along a host of dimensions – likelihood of receiving an interview, likelihood of being hired, ability, commitment, work experience, etc. There were two primary axes of variation in the survey experiment. First, we manipulated the most recent job type on the applicant’s resume. Since we were interested in the consequences of non-standard work histories at the hiring interface, respondents were randomly assigned to review resumes where the most recent 12 months of work experience on the resume was either a full-time job, a part-time job, a job through a temporary employment agency, a job below an individual’s skill level, or a spell of unemployment. For the second axis of variation, we varied the race and gender of the applicant using racialized and gendered names. Preliminary analyses of the survey data indicate that workers are penalized for having histories of non-standard employment. Compared to workers with a full-time employment history, workers with histories of non-standard employment are rated as being less likely to be interviewed, hired, and promoted and they receive lower starting salary recommendations. The second component of the project was a field experiment, sometimes referred to as an audit study, where we sent experimentally manipulated applications to apply for real job openings. The field experiment enabled us to explore whether histories of non-standard work have consequences for the hiring outcomes of workers in the actual labor market. The experimental manipulations for the field experiment were the same as they were for the survey experiment discussed above. For this component of the research, we submitted nearly 5,000 applications to almost 2,500 employers in five U.S. labor markets – Boston, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. We applied for openings in sales, accounting/bookkeeping, project management/management, and administrative/clerical job types. The primary outcome variable for our analysis was whether an application received a positive response or "callback" from the employer. Preliminary findings indicate that, overall, histories on non-standard work and underemployment are scarring for workers, leading them to receive a lower rate of "callbacks" from employers than workers with full-time employment histories. We also find evidence that the effects of some types of underemployment vary by the race and gender or the worker.
