Laura Giuliano

Peer Effects and Multiple Equilibria in the Risky Behavior of Friends

We study social interactions in the initiation of sex and other risky behaviors by best friend pairs in the Add Health panel. Focusing on friends with minimal experience at the baseline interview, we estimate bivariate ordered-choice models that include both peer effects and unobserved heterogeneity. We find significant peer effects in sexual initiation: the likelihood of initiating intercourse within a year increases by almost 5 percentage points (on an 11% base rate) if ones friend also initiates intercourse. Similar effects are present for smoking, marijuana use, and truancy. We find larger effects for females and important asymmetries in nonreciprocated friendships.

Minimum Wage Effects on Employment, Substitution, and the Teenage Labor Supply: Evidence from Personnel Data

Using personnel data from a large US retail firm, I examine the firm’s response to the 1996 federal minimum wage increase. Compulsory increases in average wages had negative but statistically insignificant effects on overall employment. However, increases in the relative wages of teenagers led to significant increases in the relative employment of teenagers, especially younger and more affluent teenagers. Further analysis suggests a pattern consistent with noncompetitive models. Where the legislation affected mainly the wages of teenagers and so was only moderately binding, it led both to higher teenage labor market participation and to higher absolute employment of teenagers.

Racial Bias in the Manager-Employee Relationship An Analysis of Quits, Dismissals, and Promotions at a Large Retail Firm

Using data from a large U.S. retail firm, we examine how racial matches between managers and their employees affect rates of employee quits, dismissals, and promotions. We exploit changes in management at hundreds of stores to estimate hazard models with store fixed effects that control for all unobserved differences across store locations. We find a general pattern of own-race bias in that employees usually have better outcomes when they are the same race as their manager. But we do find anomalies in this pattern, particularly when the manager-employee match violates traditional racial hierarchies (for example, nonwhites managing whites).

Manager Ethnicity and Employment Segregation

The authors examine the effect of manager ethnicity on the ethnic composition of employment using nine years of personnel records from a regional grocery store chain in the United States. The workforce studied is composed almost entirely of a white majority and a large Hispanic minority; the authors focus on the role of Hispanic ethnicity. Estimating models with store fixed effects, the authors examine the effects of manager ethnicity on hiring, transfer, and separation patterns. Effects of manager ethnicity are compared across several types of jobs, with significant effects occurring on hiring patterns but not on transfers, and effects occurring on separation patterns in only one atypical case. The authors also find that the effects on hiring occur only in jobs or departments with very few employees.

Universal screening increases the representation of low-income and minority students in gifted education

Significance A longstanding concern about gifted education in the United States is the underrepresentation of minorities and economically disadvantaged groups. One explanation for this gap is that standard processes for identifying gifted students, which are based largely on the referrals of parents and teachers, tend to miss many qualified students. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that a universal screening program in a large urban school district led to significant increases in the numbers of poor and minority students who met the IQ standards for gifted status. Our findings raise the question of whether a systemic failure to identify qualified students from all backgrounds may help explain the broader pattern of minority underrepresentation in all advanced K−12 academic programs. Low-income and minority students are substantially underrepresented in gifted education programs. The disparities persist despite efforts by many states and school districts to broaden participation through changes in their eligibility criteria. One explanation for the persistent gap is that standard processes for identifying gifted students, which are based largely on the referrals of parents and teachers, tend to miss qualified students from underrepresented groups. We study this hypothesis using the experiences of a large urban school district following the introduction of a universal screening program for second graders. Without any changes in the standards for gifted eligibility, the screening program led to large increases in the fractions of economically disadvantaged and minority students placed in gifted programs. Comparisons of the newly identified gifted students with those who would have been placed in the absence of screening show that Blacks and Hispanics, free/reduced price lunch participants, English language learners, and girls were all systematically “underreferred” in the traditional parent/teacher referral system. Our findings suggest that parents and teachers often fail to recognize the potential of poor and minority students and those with limited English proficiency.