IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pri/indrel/52.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring the Effect of an Antidiscrimination Program

Author

Listed:
  • Orley Ashenfelter

    (Princeton University)

  • James Heckman

    (University of Chicago)

Abstract

Since 1941, six Executive Orders have been issued forbidding Federal government contractors from discriminating against minority workers. In principle, all prospective contractors are required to demonstrate compliance with the law before a contract is let. The potential penalties are severe: failure to comply with the law may result in revocation of current contracts and suspension of the right to bid on future contracts. Despite these provisions, doubts have been raised about the effectiveness of the Orders. Defenders of the Orders cite cases in which contract award dates have been postponed until firms have taken steps toward compliance with the law. In this paper, we investigate these competing claims using data from 40,445 establishments sampled in 1966 and 1970. In the first section of this paper, we distinguish what can be measured from what cannot. We develop a framework to measure and interpret program effects. In the second section we discuss the design of our sample and present results of an analysis of the randomness of this sample. In the third and concluding section, we present the estimates and discuss their plausibility.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Orley Ashenfelter & James Heckman, 1974. "Measuring the Effect of an Antidiscrimination Program," Working Papers 432, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    • Handle: RePEc:pri:indrel:52
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01rj430455t/1/52.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. William J. Collins, 2001. "Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(1), pages 272-286, March.
    2. Jonathan S. Leonard, 1985. "The Effectiveness of Equal Employment Law and Affirmative Action Regulation," NBER Working Papers 1745, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Jonathan S. Leonard, 1984. "Antidiscrimination or Reverse Discrimination: The Impact of Changing Demographics, Title VII, and Affirmative Action on Productivity," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 19(2), pages 145-174.
    4. Heckman, James J & Payner, Brook S, 1989. "Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 138-177, March.
    5. John J. Donohue III & Steven D. Levitt, 1998. "The Impact of Race on Policing, Arrest Patterns, and Crime," NBER Working Papers 6784, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Leonard, Jonathan S, 1984. "Employment and Occupational Advance under Affirmative Action," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 66(3), pages 377-385, August.
    7. Jonathan S. Leonard, 1985. "What Promises Are Worth: The Impact of Affirmative Action Goals," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 20(1), pages 3-20.
    8. Justin McCrary, 2006. "The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police," NBER Working Papers 12368, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Boris Salazar-Trujillo & Daniel Otero Robles, 2019. "La revolución empírica en economía," Apuntes del Cenes, Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, vol. 38(68), pages 15-48, July.
    10. Richard B. Freeman, 1982. "Public Policy and Employment Discrimination in the U.S," NBER Working Papers 0928, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Leonard, Jonathan S, 1984. "The Impact of Affirmative Action on Employment," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 2(4), pages 439-463, October.
    12. Leonard, Jonathan S., 1987. "The interaction of residential segregation and employment discrimination," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 323-346, May.
    13. Caitlin Knowles Myers, 2007. "A Cure for Discrimination? Affirmative Action and the Case of California's Proposition 209," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 60(3), pages 379-396, April.
    14. Charles Brown, 1981. "The Federal Attack on Labor Market Discrimination: The Mouse that Roared?," NBER Working Papers 0669, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pri:indrel:52. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bobray Bordelon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/irprius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.