Using longitudinal data collected in 1996-98 from over 800 similar workplaces owned and operated by a single corporation, the authors examine how workplace diversity and employee isolation along the dimensions of gender, race, and age affected employee turnover. Their design controls for much of...

The unionized sector is often thought of as the dominant focus of wage rigidity and hence employment instability in Keynesian models that attribute unemployment to rigid wages. Where the price mechanism is frozen, quantity changes are amplified. This paper compares intertemporal employment...

Employee diversity may affect business performance both as a result of customer discrimination and as a result of how members of a group work with each other in teams. We test for both channels with data from more than 800 retail stores employing over 70,000 individuals, matched to Census data...

Recent arguments that employment growth occurs is proportionately at small establishments are fundamentally misleading because they confuse regression to the mean with structural shifts in the size distribution of establishments and with an aging effect within cohorts.

Affirmative action goals and timetables have been criticized by some as being ineffective and by others as being a system of rigid quotas. In this paper I present estimates of the impact of detailed regulatory pressure on goals and on subsequent demographics. While the goals are inflated and are...

This study estimates the changes over time in the relative productivities of minorities and females. I find no significant evidence that the productivity of minorities or females decreased relative to that of white males as relative minority and female employment increased during the 1960s and...

We test for customer discrimination with data from more than 800 retail stores employing over 70,000 individuals matched to census data on the demographics of each store's community. While our tests detect some increase in sales when the workforce more closely resembles potential customers, the...