Assessing Affirmative Action

Abstract

Economic research provides extensive evidence regarding discrimination against women and minorities, and some evidence on the redistributive effects of affirmative action. However, it provides much less evidence on affirmative action's impact on efficiency or performance, perhaps the key economic issue in the debate over affirmative action. This review covers all of these issues, but focuses on the efficiency/performance question, drawing on economics and other disciplines. The evidence suggests to us that affirmative action can be implemented with relatively little efficiency loss. Most importantly, the empirical case against affirmative action on the grounds of efficiency is weak at best.

A lay-statistician explanation of minority discrimination

“…For instance, research by Holzer & Neumark (2000) shows that affirmative action policies increase the number of applications from females and minorities. Our argument thus suggests an additional mechanism through which these policies can reduce hiring discrimination: by reducing disparities in the relative number of applicants from majority vs. minority candidates, such policies should reduce discrimination based on the lay statistician mechanism outline above.…”

Estimating the distortionary effects of ethnic quotas in Singapore using housing transactions

“…2 In addition to these budget amounts, there could also be unintended distortionary costs introduced by these policies. There is a large literature on the redistributive benefits of these policies, but there is less on distortionary costs (Holzer and Neumark, 2000). I investigate potential policy-induced distortionary costs using a natural experiment in Singapore -the ethnic housing quota policy.…”

“…To my knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate distortionary effects of a residential desegregation policy using housing transactions. 4 To do this, I develop a conceptual framework that delivers testable predictions on how prices and quantities are expected to differ for apartment blocks that are above the quota 1 See Holzer and Neumark (2000) for a review of diversity policies in education, employment and government procurement in the United States. Around 100 countries have adopted gender quotas in politics (Krook, 2009).…”

“…In Section 2, I provide some background on Singapore and the ethnic quotas. I describe the data in Section 3, provide a theoretical and empirical framework in Sections 4 and 5, discuss results in Section 6 and 13 See Holzer and Neumark (2000) for a review. See Corns and Schotter (1999) and McAfee and McMillan (1989) for examples of efficiency gains due to diversity-enhancing policies that encourage more competition in a setting with imperfect competition.…”

Why do I like people like me?

“…7 S e ef o o t n o t e4 . 8 Up to our knowledge, and according to Holzer and Neumark (2000), Neumark (1999) provides the only empirical analysis about the reliability of the labor market information of various groups. manding information requirements.…”