This project investigates how health status may operate as a labor market sorting mechanism, particularly in shaping exposure to precarious scheduling, and how this process is conditioned by race and gender. While the negative health consequences of precarious work are well established, emerging evidence suggests a bidirectional relationship: health may also structure access to quality work schedules. Yet this sorting process remains under-theorized and lacks causal identification.
To address this gap, the study employs a vignette-based factorial experiment. Human resource professionals and hiring managers will evaluate hypothetical job candidates whose profiles are randomly varied by health status, gender, and race, while holding constant productivity-related qualifications and experience. Respondents will evaluate each candidate for a position characterized by stable, predictable work hours and a degree of worker input into scheduling. Respondents will rate candidate suitability for each position, enabling estimation of how employers interpret health and its intersection with demographic cues when assigning schedule quality.
The study pursues three specific aims:
- Aim 1: Estimate the causal effect of health status on employers’ evaluations of candidate suitability and entitlement for positions differing in schedule quality, net of observed productivity and credentials.
- Aim 2: Assess whether the effects of health-based signals are moderated by demographic backgrounds of race and gender, which may produce compounding penalties for multiply marginalized candidates.
- Aim 3 (broader): Evaluate whether health status is used as an informal sorting criterion in employer decision-making regarding schedule quality, thereby identifying a behavioral mechanism with implications for labor market inequality.
By isolating how health and demographic attributes shape evaluative judgments in the assignment of scheduling conditions, this project contributes new evidence to theories of labor market stratification and illuminates a pathway through which employment inequality may be reproduced over time.