TY  - JOUR
AU  - Donohue,John J.,III
AU  - Heckman,James
TI  - Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3894
PY  - 1991
Y2  - November 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3894
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3894.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John J. Donohue
Stanford Law School
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/721-6339
E-Mail: donohue@law.stanford.edu

James J. Heckman
Department of Economics
The University of Chicago
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-0634
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: jjh@uchicago.edu
AB  - This paper examines the available evidence on the causes of black economic advance in order to assess the contribution of federal policy. Over the period 1920-1990, there were only two periods of relative black economic improvement -- during the 1940s and in the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the voting Rights Act of 1965, and the institution of the government contracts compliance program. Black migration from the South, a traditional source of economic gains for blacks, almost stopped at about this same time, and recent evidence on the impact of black schooling gains indicates that educational gains cannot explain the magnitude of black economic progress beginning in the mid-1960s.
ER  -