Promoting Educational Opportunities: Long-run Implications of Affirmative Action in College Admissions

João Ramos and Bernard Herskovic
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Bernard Herskovic: UCLA Anderson School of Management

No 1552, 2017 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper investigates the implications of affirmative action in college admissions for welfare, aggregate output, educational investment decisions and intergenerational persistence of earnings. We construct an overlapping-generations model in which parents choose how much to invest in their child's education, thereby increasing both human capital and likelihood of college admission. Affirmative action improves the pool of admitted students, although it changes incentives towards educational investments. We calibrate the model to quantify affirmative action long-run effects. We find that affirmative action targeting the bottom quintile of the income distribution is a powerful policy to reduce intergenerational persistence of earnings and improve welfare and aggregate output.

Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-edu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed017:1552

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