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Title: The long-run impacts of banning affirmative action in US higher education
Abstract This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion, earnings, and employment of URM individuals to non-URM individuals before and after affirmative action bans went into effect across several US states. We also employ event study analyses and alternative estimators to confirm the validity of our approach and discuss the generalizability of the findings. Results suggest that banning affirmative action results in a decline in URM women’s college degree completion, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, driven largely by impacts on Hispanic women. Thus, affirmative action bans resulted in an increase in racial/ethnic disparities in both college degree completion and earnings among women. Effects on URM men are more ambiguous and indicate significant heterogeneity across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive impact on labour market outcomes of Black men. These results suggest that the relative magnitude of college quality versus mismatch effects vary for URM men and women and highlight the importance of disaggregating results by gender, race, and ethnicity. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with others in the literature and directions for future research.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2121120
PAR ID:
10560579
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Oxford University Press
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Oxford Review of Economic Policy
Volume:
40
Issue:
3
ISSN:
0266-903X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
607 to 628
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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