An Analysis of the Impact of Affirmative Action Programs on Self-Employment in the Construction Industry

David Blanchflower () and Jon Wainwright

No 11793, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The main findings of this paper are that despite the existence of various affirmative action programs designed to improve the position of women and minorities in public construction, little has changed in the last twenty five years. We present evidence showing that where race conscious affirmative action programs exist they appear to generate significant improvements: when these programs are removed or replaced with race-neutral programs the utilization of minorities and women in public construction declines rapidly. We show that the programs have not helped minorities to become self-employed or to raise their earnings over the period 1979-2004, using data from the Current Population Survey and the Census, but have improved the position of white females. There has been a growth in incorporated self-employment rates of white women in construction such that currently their rate is significantly higher than that of white men. The data are suggestive of the possibility that some of these companies are 'fronts' which are actually run by their white male spouses or sons to take advantage of the affirmative action programs.

JEL-codes: J4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
Date: 2005-11
Note: LE LS
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11793.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: An Analysis of the Impact of Affirmative Action Programs on Self-Employment in the Construction Industry (2005)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11793

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11793
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().