Why Do Small Establishments Hire Fewer Blacks Than Large Ones?
发现小企业雇佣黑人的比例远低于大企业，并检验了申请率、技能需求、地理位置和招聘行为等可能解释，但大部分差异仍无法解释，暗示小企业可能存在更普遍的歧视。
This paper shows that small establishments are much less likely to hire and employ blacks than are larger establishments.A number of possible explanations for this result are considered, such as differences across establishments in application rates from blacks, skill needs, locations, and recruiting behavior.Although these factors can account for some of the differences between small and large employers, much remains unexplained.The results suggest that discrimination in hiring may be much more pervasive at smaller establishments than larger ones.Both Carrington, McCue, and Pierce and Chay analyze changes over time in the relationship between 1 establishment size and tendency to hire blacks.Carrington et al. stress that this relationship grew much more positive during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they infer from this that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was responsible for this development.Smith and Welch make a similar point in their comparison of black employment at firms that are required to file EEO-1 firms with the federal government compared with those that are not, a distinction that is based almost exclusively on establishment size (as noted below).Chay notes the improvement of black employment and relative earnings in smaller establishments in the South after the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed in 1972, but a growing gap between black employment shares at small and large firms (especially in the South) can clearly be found in his data. Why Do Small Establishments Hire Fewer Blacks than Large Ones?It is well-known that some establishments are more likely to hire blacks (or other minorities) than others.For instance, federal contractors are more likely to hire blacks than noncontractors, due to federal Affirmative Action regulations (Leonard 1990).Also, firms located in central cities or closer to the residential locations of blacks are more likely to hire them than are those located further away (Kain 1968; Holzer and Ihlanfeldt 1996b).This paper documents a strong empirical relationship that has received much less attention in the literature to date: namely, that small establishments hire many fewer blacks (as percentages of their employees) than do large establishments.This finding has recently been noted elsewhere by Carrington, McCue, and Pierce (1995) and Chay (1995) and is implicit in earlier work by Smith and Welch (1984). 1 But the link between establishment size and black employment has never been systematically explored with microlevel establishment data; thus, the magnitude of this relationship has not been well established, and its underlying causes are not well understood.The paper briefly discusses some possible reasons for a relationship between employer size and the hiring of blacks.I then describe the data used here, which are from a new survey of employers in several large metropolitan areas in the United States.Some summary results on the relationship between establishment size and the employment of blacks are presented, followed by results from some regressions that test a variety of hypotheses that might explain the relationship.Since our ability to account for this Of course, it is also possible that larger establishments will engage in reverse discrimination against 2 whites, which is discussed below.Brown and Medoff (1989) show that the higher skill levels of employees at large establishments only 3 partly accounts for their higher wages there.Garen (1985) and Barron, Bishop, and Lowenstein (1987) argue that monitoring difficulties in large establishments lead them to substitute skilled for unskilled employees, leading also to higher training and wages.Neal and Johnson (1996) show that the higher educational attainment and test scores of whites account 4 for much of the black-white wage gap and less of the gap in employment rates.The lower turnover rates and higher application rates associated with size are only partly explained by 5