Volume 35, Number 3 (Summer) 2000
Carrington, William J., Kristin McCue, and Brooks Pierce. 2000. "Using Establishment Size to Measure the Impact of Title VII and Affirmative Action." Journal of Human Resources 35(3):503-523.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action apply most forcefully to large employers. The laws' focus on large employers implies that if Title VII and Affirmative Action were effective, then large employers should have increased their relative employment of blacks and women in the years following their institution. We show blacks and women did, in fact, move to larger employers after 1964. We also estimate that the move to larger employers accounted for roughly 15 percent of aggregate black/white wage convergence over the 1965-80 period. Thus, whatever, its cause, blacks' movement to large employers was an important part of black economic progress after 1964.
William J. Carrington is a Senior Economist with Unicon Research Corporation and Welch Consulting, Ltd. and Brooks Pierce is a Research Economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Kristin McCue is an Economist with the Center for Economic Studies of the Bureau of the Census. We thank Charles Brown, John Donohue, Kevin M. Murphy, Finis Welch, and an anonymous referee for useful comments. We are particularly grateful to Ken Chay for an extensive set of comments that greatly improved the paper. Most of the paper was written while McCue and Pierce were at Texas A&M University, and while Carrington was at Johns Hopkins University. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or any other agency of the U.S. Department of Labor. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning March 2001 through February 2004 from Brooks Pierce, Room 4130, Office of Compensation and Working Conditions, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 Massachusetts Ave., NE, Washington, D.C. 20212.
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