WORKING PAPERS

From Callbacks to Careers: Do Audit Studies Predict Workforce Diversity?

with Danny Onorato, Adina D. Sterling, and Emmanuel Yimfor

Do callback gaps from audit studies translate into real employment differences? We match firms from Kline, Rose and Walters (2022)’s large-scale correspondence experiment to LinkedIn employment records. Firms discriminating more against Black applicants in callbacks employ fewer Black workers. The employment gap is three times what callback gaps alone would predict. This amplification is not explained by local labor supply: controlling for local Black population shares does not attenuate the relationship. Instead, Black workers at high-discrimination firms have smaller qualification gaps relative to White coworkers and better outside options when they leave, consistent with discrimination continuing at the interview and offer stages. This relationship concentrates among the top quartile of discriminatory firms, is stronger for employees hired during the audit period and at entry-level positions, and replicates with larger magnitudes when restricting to the exact occupations targeted by the audit study. Fewer than 3% of Black workers we identify from profile pictures have the distinctive names used in the experiment, yet callback gaps predict employment for the broader Black workforce. However, callback gaps do not predict post-hire outcomes: Black workers face promotion penalties across all firms, but these disparities are uncorrelated with callback gaps. These findings validate correspondence experiments as measures of hiring barriers, suggesting that targeting the most discriminatory firms could reduce hiring disparities.

PUBLICATIONS

Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door

with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson, and Winnie van Dijk

Quarterly Journal of Economics (2025)

[publisher's link]  [pdf] [NBER wp]  [Non-technical (Cato)] 

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration (relative to noncarceral conviction) leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. Our empirical results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and overlooked driver of recidivism.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Skin Tone and Racial Inequality in the US: Evidence from the 20th Century

with Danny Onorato

Impacts of the 1980s Recession on Workers, Labor Markets, and the Earnings Distribution

with Danny Onorato