Affirmative Action, Incentives and the Black-White Test Score Gap

Eric Furstenberg ()

No 3, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: This paper develops a theoretical model of college admissions to study the effects of affirmative action policies on the high school achievement of college bound students. The innovation is to include endogenous human capital decisions in the model. When colleges switch admissions policies, they implicitly alter the likelihood of acceptance earned by a given human capital investment. Thus, human capital investments are sensitive to changes in admissions policies. The main results are that banning affirmative action increases the black-white test score gap and decreases college enrollment and social welfare of the minority group.

Keywords: Affirmative Action; Discrimination; Public Policy; Education; Asymmetric Information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 I20 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2004-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp3.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Alfredo Pereira ().