The Civil Rights Act and Asian/Hispanic Earnings

Urban Institute, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

A substantial literature has developed attempting to determine the impact of civil rights policies on the 1960's improvement in black relative earnings. Much less has been written about changes during this period in the economic status of Asians and Hispanics, who received protections against employment discrimination via the national origin clause of the Civil Rights Act. One reason for the dearth of attention is that unlike African Americans, Hispanics and Asians were not identified on the Current Population Survey (CPS) until 1969. This project complements previous Census-based studies on Asian and Hispanic economic status by focusing on the question of whether (and how) the 1964 Civil Rights Act and associated Federal anti-discrimination efforts affected the economic status of Americans of Asian and Hispanic descent. Using census and longitudinal earnings data, two central questions are addressed: 1. Is there an unexplained change in Asian and Hispanic economic status relative to that of whites that coincides with Federal anti-discrimination efforts? 2. What were the mechanisms of this change? In doing so, this project offers two major advances toward the study of this question. First, it overcomes the identification hurdle by using post-1969 survey data to identify Asians and Hispanics in several data sets that match CPS and Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data to Social Security's longitudinal, historical earnings data. Second, by following the same individuals before and after the Civil Rights Act, this study circumvents the effects of coincident changes in sample selection. In addition to using Social Security historical longitudinal data, both alone and matched to survey sources, the project also uses public use micro sample (PUMS) data from the 1940-1980 decennial censuses.