An important claim made for affirmative action programs has been that they need not be permanent: they can be discontinued, the argument runs, once they have transformed employers' attitudes. Proposition 209, enacted in California in 1996 and made effective the following year, represents a natural experiment testing that claim. It ended long-standing state affirmative action programs not only in education, but also in public employment and government contracting. The author uses Current Population Survey data to gauge the labor market effects of this dramatic policy change. The key finding is that employment among women and minorities dropped sharply, almost wholly because of a decline in labor force participation rather than an increase in unemployment. This finding, the author argues, suggests that affirmative action programs in California either had been inefficient-that is, resulted in sub-optimal employee-employer matches-or had failed to create lasting change in employers' prejudicial attitudes.
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Article provided by ILR Review, ILR School, Cornell University in its journal ILR Review.
Volume (Year): 60 (2007) Issue (Month): 3 (April) Pages: 379-396 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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Susan Athey, 1998.
"Mentoring and Diversity,"
Working papers
98-2, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
Other versions:
Susan Athey & Christopher Avery & Peter Zemsky, 1998.
"Mentoring and Diversity,"
NBER Working Papers
6496, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Susan Athey & Christopher Avery & Peter Zemsky, 2000.
"Mentoring and Diversity,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 765-786, September.
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