Fidan Ana Kurtulus, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Recent years have witnessed efforts to rescind affirmative action at the state-level, with California prohibiting affirmative action in public employment in 1996, Washington in 1998, Michigan in 2006, Nebraska in 2008, Arizona in 2010, and New Hampshire and Oklahoma in 2012, and the future of affirmative action at the federal-level in the United States is uncertain. This seminar examines the impact of eliminating affirmative action on the employment of minorities and women within a natural experiment framework using newly available state and local public employment data for 1990 to 2009 from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO-4 files). The empirical analysis exploits the panel structure of the EEO-4 data, along with the time and state variation in affirmative action bans, to estimate difference-in-differences and dynamic event-study regressions of the effects of the bans on public sector employment. Key findings point to sharp declines in Hispanic male, black female, and Asian female representation following the law changes banning affirmative action, and in the case of black women, the declines become increasingly larger in magnitude over time.