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Faculty Seminar: Affirmative Action Bans and Black-White Wage Gaps: Evidence from Public Sector Workers — 12/2

Posted on November 30, 2022 | Filed under Archive

Details — Faculty Seminar: Affirmative Action Bans and Black-White Wage Gaps: Evidence from Public Sector Workers — December 2

Date: 12/2Time: Noon

This post has been archived. Information below may be out of date and/or relate to a past event.

The Allegheny Community is invited to attend a faculty seminar with Visiting Professor Shiyi Chen when she presents her paper entitled “Affirmative Action Bans and Black-White Wage Gaps: Evidence from Public Sector Workers (with Kenneth Couch).” The seminar will be held in Quigley 220 at 12 p.m. on Friday, December 2.

Virtually all debates about affirmative action policies end by raising the topic of whether affirmative action need not be permanent. Since the 1990s, nine states have banned affirmative action in public sector employment or public educational institutions, which provides a natural experiment to test this argument. This paper estimates the impact of banning affirmative action in the public sector on Black-White wage gaps. Using data from the 1990-2019 Current Population Survey (CPS), we employ a triple-difference model and find that affirmative action bans widen Black-White wage gaps in the public sector. Remarkably, the bans decrease Black male wages in the public sector by 3.8 percentage points compared to their White counterparts. We argue that affirmative action had been effective while in place but failed to create persistent effects in reducing inequality.