Labor Market Outcomes for Asian Men and Women in the United States

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Labor Market Outcomes for Asian Men and Women in the United States This project examines labor market outcomes for Asian men and women in the United States. The Asian American population has grown from 1 percent to 6 percent in the last half-century, and Asian Americans play an increasingly important role in the U.S. labor market and in American society. Asian Americans have relatively high wages and levels of college attainment, but are also underrepresented in upper-level management positions, and have relatively high poverty rates. To better understand these patterns, the researchers study perceptions of Asian Americans, particularly whether Asian Americans tend to be perceived as technically competent, but lacking in social skills, and if so, how these perceptions affect their labor market outcomes. The project makes two major contributions. First, the study uses a range of methods to overcome the limitations of any single approach, including surveys that measure perceptions of Asian Americans, field studies examining hiring behavior by actual employers, and analysis of large-scale nationally-representative labor market data. Second, the study examines a broader group of Asian Americans than past research, looking at variation by nativity, ethnicity, sex, and income level. More broadly, the work provides insight into factors that shape Asian Americans' economic outcomes and will be of use to policymakers and employers. This research also contributes to training undergraduate and graduate students. Prior research on labor market outcomes of Asian Americans focuses on factors such as educational attainment, place of education, and local labor market conditions. The researchers build on this work by examining perceptions of Asian Americans and the consequences of these perceptions for labor market outcomes. Past work finds that Asians are perceived as technically competent, but not sociable or dominant. Much of this work focuses on men in professional occupations. The researchers extend these studies by investigating views of men and women in high and low-income jobs. The researchers will use survey experiments to measure labor market-relevant perceptions of Asian Americans, and will do so for men and women of different ethnicities and nativities, in both high and low-income jobs. Second, the researchers will conduct field studies comparing hiring outcomes of Asian Americans and other groups in jobs that require competence or sociability. Third, the researchers will use nationally representative labor market data to examine wages of Asian Americans in occupations that require skills that they are perceived to lack. We will use individual-level data drawn from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, and occupation-level data drawn from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). By combining survey experiments, field studies, and nationally representative labor market data, we capitalize on the complementary strengths of these three methods: the ability of survey experiments to support causal inference across diverse groups, the ability of field experiments to offer a real-world measure of hiring, and the representativeness of the survey data. This allows us to test the internal and external validity of our hypotheses.