Black Job Applicants and the Hiring Officer's Race

Recent studies have consistently found that in the United States, black job applicants are hired at a greater rate by establishments with black hiring agents than by those with white hiring agents. The results of this examination of data from the 1992-94 Multi-City Employer Survey suggest two proximate reasons for this pattern: black hiring agents receive applications from blacks at greater rates than do white hiring agents, and they hire a greater proportion of blacks who apply. The authors suggest that moving more blacks into positions with hiring authority within firms might help to alleviate the persistent unemploy-ment difficulties of African Americans. T he distribution of African-American employment is uneven across firms.' Several studies show that African Ameri-cans account for a greater proportion of employment in central city establishments than in suburban establishments (Stoll et al. 2000; Holzer and Ihlanfeldt 1996; Raphael 1998). Similarly, recent research on firm size and black employment demon-strates that smaller firms are less likely than larger firms to employ African Americans (Holzer 1998a; Chay 1995). In this paper, we document and explore an empirical observation that has received less atten-tion: establishments where blacks are in charge of hiring are considerably more likely to employ African Americans than are establishments in which whites are in charge of hiring. This empirical regularity has surfaced in several recent studies. Raphael et al. (2000) showed that suburban firms with black hir-ing agents are more likely to hire African Americans than are suburban or central city firms with white hiring agents. Usin