The Stability of the American Business Elite
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NBER Historical Working Paper No. 110
Issued in December 1998
NBER Program(s): DAE
This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to discrimination on the job or to principal-agent factors. The most likely explanation is that this demographic group makes the best business managers. I suggest that this in turn is not because they are inherently superior, but because they have had access to superior education, a result of past discrimination.
Published: Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 8 (June 1999): 189-210.
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