Full Citation
Title: The Effects of Race and Sex Discrimination Laws
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2001
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Abstract: The question of the effects of race and sex discrimination laws on relative economic outcomes for blacks and women has been of interest at least since the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts passed in the 1960s. We present new evidence on the effects of these laws based on variation induced first by state anti-discrimination statutes passed prior to the federal legislation, and then by the extension of anti-discrimination prohibitions to the remaining states with the passage of federal legislation. This evidence in some ways improves on earlier time-series studies of the effects of anti-discrimination legislation, and is complementary to more recent work that revisits this question using data and statistical quasi-experiments that provide treatment and comparison groups. We examine the effects of race and sex discrimination laws on employment and earnings, in each case focusing on outcomes for black females, black males, and white females relative to white males. Overall, we interpret the evidence as corroborating the general conclusion that race discrimination laws positively impacted the relative employment and earnings of blacks, although the evidence is less dramatic than that in other research, and there are some sub-groups and periods for which we find little positive impact (more often for black males). We find some evidence that sex discrimination laws boost the relative earnings of females for both black and white females, although it is not robust. Finally, we find that sex discrimination/equal pay laws reduced the relative employment of black women and white women.
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Authors: Stock, Wendy; Neumark, David
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Publication Number: 8215
Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research
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Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Crime and Deviance, Race and Ethnicity
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