What Does Affirmative Action Do?

Harry Holzer and David Neumark

ILR Review, 2000, vol. 53, issue 2, 240-271

Abstract: The authors use data from a survey of employers to investigate how Affirmative Action in recruiting and hiring influences hiring practices, personnel policies, and ultimately employment outcomes. They find that Affirmative Action increases the number of recruitment and screening practices used by employers, raises employers' willingness to hire stigmatized applicants, increases the number of minority or female applicants as well as employees, and increases employers' tendencies to provide training and formally evaluate employees. When Affirmative Action is used in recruiting, it generally does not lead to lower credentials or performance of women and minorities hired. When it is also used in hiring, it yields minority employees whose credentials are somewhat weaker, though performance generally is not. Overall, the more intensive search, evaluation, and training that accompany Affirmative Action appear to offset any tendencies of the policy to lead to hiring of less-qualified or less-productive women and minorities.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979390005300204 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Does Affirmative Action Do? (1998)
Working Paper: What Does Affirmative Action Do?
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:sae:ilrrev:v:53:y:2000:i:2:p:240-271

DOI: 10.1177/001979390005300204

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().