Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in wellbeing has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well?being among blacks relative to whites. Investigating various measures of well?being, we find that the well?being of blacks has increased both absolutely and relative to that of whites. While a racial gap in well?being remains, two?fifths of the gap has closed and these gains have occurred despite little progress in closing other racial gaps such as those in income, employment, and education. Much of the current racial gap in well?being can be explained by differences in the objective conditions of the lives of black and white Americans. Thus making further progress will likely require progress in closing racial gaps in objective circumstances.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; life satisfaction; happiness; race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 I32 J1 J7 K1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-ltv
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... lfers_full_paper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress (2013)
Working Paper: Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress (2013)
Working Paper: Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress (2013)
Working Paper: Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress (2013)
Journal Article: Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress (2012)
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:een:camaaa:2013-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().