The Impact of Affirmative Action on the Employment of Minorities and Women over Three Decades: 1973–2003.” Unpublished manuscript

What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper analyzes this issue by comparing the employment of minorities and women at firms holding federal contracts and therefore mandated to implement affirmative action, and non-contracting firms, over the course of three decades spanning 1973-2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long-term impact of affirmative action in federal contracting on the U.S. employment landscape. The study uses a new panel dataset of over 100,000 large private-sector firms across all industries and regions obtained from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and exploits rich variation across firms in the timing of federal contracting to identify affirmative action effects. The paper’s key results indicate that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973-2003 were black and Native American women and men. Analysis of the dynamics of workforce composition around the time of contracting reveals that a large part of the effect of affirmative action on increasing protected group shares occurred within the first four years of gaining a contract, and that these increased shares persisted even after a firm was n