Critics have said that affirmative action is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. In particular, it has been argued that if affirmative action helps anybody, it helps only the highly educated cream of the minority population, and may perversely work to the detriment of the...

Previous analyses of postwar black/white earnings ratios have found a more rapid rate of increase in the period since 1964 than before. The reason for this acceleration is unresolved. One view is that federal equal-employment activities have increased the relative demand for black labor. An...

This paper investigates the effect of a large negative agricultural shock, the boll weevil, on black-white inequality in the first half of the twentieth century. To do this we use complete count census data to generate a linked sample of fathers and their sons. We find that the boll weevil...

Using a large field experiment, we show that racial composition of employer neighborhoods predicts employment discrimination patterns in a direction suggesting in-group bias. Our data also show racial disparities in the geographic distribution of job postings. Simulations illustrate how these...

In traditional signaling models, education provides a way for individuals to sort themselves by ability. Employers in turn use education to statistically discriminate, paying wages that reflect the average productivity of workers with the same given level of education. In this paper, we provide...

We propose a model that combines statistical discrimination and educational sorting that explains why blacks get more education than do whites of similar cognitive ability. Our model explains the difference between blacks and whites in the relations between education and AFQT and between wages...

The weekly wage gap between black and white female workers narrowed by 15 percentage points during the 1940s. We employ a semi-parametric technique to decompose changes in the distribution of wages. We find that changes in worker characteristics (such as education, occupation and industry, and...

Taken as a whole, the literature on black-white wage inequality suggests that racial gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women, and further that one can accurately assess black-white gaps in potential wages among women without accounting for black-white differences in patterns...