Suchergebnisse

Only 3% of the 1,904 submissions to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's historic competition for a single grant of US$100 million, 100&Change, proposed work to address racial equity in the United States. Through a close examination of these submissions, this 2018 Samuel V. Westerfield lecture presents a taxonomy of the work of nonprofits working to address racial equity and an analysis of the weaknesses in their submitted applications. The lecture concludes these applications would have been stronger if there were greater engagement between social sector organizations and academic economists. The lecture issues a call to action for economists to communicate beyond an academic audience, to form partnerships with nonprofit organizations, and to move beyond applied economics to translational economics.

This article looks, with humor, at the role of black economists in academia and in the economics profession.

This article presents Atkinson indices of racial income inequality for 1954–1989. This approach permits the study of racial inequality and inequality in the overall distribution of income in a consistent framework. The Atkinson index shows that progress towards racial equality stopped much earlier than observation of mean income ratios would suggest and that most of the gains have been eroded.

AbstractThis article examines the effect on wages of the Asian‐American stereotype as mathematically and technically adept, and the role this stereotype may play in explaining racial wage differences. We propose an empirical strategy to examine the influence of stereotypes on labor market outcomes, with a specific application to the wage premium associated with computer use at work. Using Current Population Survey data, ordinary least squares estimates do not provide compelling evidence that a positive stereotype affects wages for Asian Americans.

This article investigates the feminization of poverty prior to 1960 by focusing on three factors that contributed to the increase in the propensity to form female-headed households and to the poverty rate among such households. Compared with 1939, households headed by prime-age women in 1959 included fewer adults, thereby reducing earnings potential. The earnings level at which such women formed independent households was lower relative to the poverty line; and although higher earnings allowed more women to form independent households, the increase was not large enough to lift some of these households out of poverty.

Efforts to diversify the economics profession have included increasing the number of African Americans and other people of color who enroll in and complete the PhD degree in economics. This article recounts the experiences of African Americans who entered graduate study at Stanford University between 1967 and 1984 and the university's record of adding to the pool of African American PhD economists.

Using data from the University of California and results from previously published research on the returns to higher education, this article presents a preliminary evaluation of the impact of ending affirmative action in admissions at a large, publicly funded university. At the undergraduate level, eliminating race as a factor in the admissions process will redistribute African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans away from the most competitive campuses (UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-San Diego) towards the less competitive campuses in the California State University system. This redistribution will lower the returns to schooling for those affected groups and could have a negative impact on the educational environment for all students. Affirmative action will, in the short run, reduce the number of African American, Mexican American, and Native American students admitted and, in the long run, will have an adverse effect on the delivery of legal and health care services to those racial and ethnic groups.