TY  - JOUR
AU  - Autor,David H.
AU  - Scarborough,David
TI  - Will Job Testing Harm Minority Workers?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10763
PY  - 2004
Y2  - September 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10763
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10763.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Autor
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-371
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/258-7698
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: dautor@mit.edu

David Scarborough
Black Hills State University and Kronos, Inc.
College of Business and Technology
1200 University Street, Unit 9551
Spearfish, South Dakota  57799-9551
E-Mail: dscarborough@unicru.com
AB  - Because minorities typically fare poorly on standardized tests, job testing is thought to pose an equity-efficiency trade-off: testing improves selection but reduces minority hiring. We develop a conceptual framework to assess when this tradeoff is likely to apply and evaluate the evidence for such a trade-off using data from a national retail firm whose 1,363 stores switched from informal to test-based worker screening over the course of on year. We document that testing yielded more productive hires at this firm -- raising median tenure by 10-plus percent. Consistent with prior research, minorities performed worse on the test. Yet, testing had no measurable impact on minority hiring, and productivity gains were uniformly large among minorities and non-minorities. These results suggest that job testing raised the precision of screening without introducing additional negative information about minority applicants, most plausibly because both the job test and the informal screen that preceded it were unbiased.
ER  -