TY  - JOUR
AU  - Temin,Peter
TI  - The Stability of the American Business Elite
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Historical Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 110
PY  - 1998
Y2  - December 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/h0110
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/h0110.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Peter Temin
Department of Economics
MIT, Room E52-271A
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-3126
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: ptemin@mit.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -