What Determines Public Support for Affirmative Action?

Murat Iyigun and Andrew Levin ()

Southern Economic Journal, 2003, vol. 69, issue 3, 612-627

Abstract: We present a public higher‐education finance model in which demand for education can exceed supply because of indivisibilities in educational investment. In such situations, a screening mechanism—which may exhibit a selection system bias—is required for allocation. We show how changes in the education premium and the test score gap between the minority and the majority might affect political support for affirmative action. When the education premium is relatively low, the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action are high compared with the opportunity cost of not acquiring education, and the majority supports affirmative action. When the education premium is high, the opportunity cost of not getting educated is high relative to the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action policies, and the majority's support for affirmative action is weaker. In contrast, a higher test score bias has a generally ambigious effect on the majority's political support. If the test score bias is sufficiently large, however, the majority does support affirmative action.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2325-8012.2003.tb00516.x

Related works:
Working Paper: What determines public support for affirmative action? (1998)
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:wly:soecon:v:69:y:2003:i:3:p:612-627

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().