Racial-Ethnic Poverty Gaps in Later Life: A Role for Late Career Employment Quality?

Racial-ethnic disparities in poverty are an important form of inequality in older age. Recent scholarship on racial-ethnic poverty gaps demonstrates that, beyond individual characteristics and behaviors, racialized structural factors like employment contribute to such gaps. Yet surprisingly little is known about the role of employment quality, despite observed racial-ethnic disparities in employment quality and the role of employment history in shaping later life well-being. Using data from the 2002–2018 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and three poverty measures, we decompose the proportions of the Black-white and Hispanic-white poverty gaps among households led by 65-year-olds that are attributable to disparities in late career employment quality. We find that racial-ethnic disparities in late career employment quality account for 17–28 percent of the observed Black-white and 18–32 percent of the observed Hispanic-white poverty gaps, thus explaining a greater proportion of such gaps than many common individual or behavioral explanations. Disaggregating employment quality into its component measures, we find racial-ethnic disparities in access to employer-provided health insurance and hourly wages account for the largest proportion of racial-ethnic poverty gaps. Our findings suggest that employment quality captures important racialized dimensions of labor market context that help account for racial-ethnic inequalities in later life poverty in the United States.