This article examines skill gaps between immigrants and native‐born Americans and generational progress achieved by different immigrant ethnic groups. Evidence of a widening skill gap is not strong. While wage data show a pronounced fall in relative wages of “recent” immigrants, significant independent contributors to that decline are a widening age gap and the increasing price of skill. When attention shifts to legal migrants, the evidence is that legal migrants are, at a minimum, keeping up with native‐born Americans. I find that the concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant ethnic groups is unfounded.

Origins of the program, 297.— Pitfalls of the policy, 299.— State Department's attempts to avoid them, 300.—Difficulty in application of most-favored-nation principle, 301.—Attempts to meet this, 302.— "Safeguards" 303.— Quotas and exchange control, 304.—Prohibitions on sanitary grounds, 305.— Monopolistic practices, 305.— Domestic planning measures, 305.— The problem of monetary instability, 307. — Conflict with bilateral exchange pacts, 309.—Conclusions: no safeguards developed against managed currency and economic planning pitfalls, 311.—Leadership incumbent upon creditor nations, 312.

Affirmative action remains controversial. The controversy extends from the original antidiscrimination legislation and its interpretation to estimates of affirmative action's effect on the labor market. This paper provides a progress report on our recent efforts at detecting the effects of affirmative action on minority wages and employment. Although we find a substantial increase in wages for black men and black women over our sample period, the timing of these wage changes is surprising. Most of the wage gains came prior to 1974, before the establishment of an effective monitoring structure for affirmative action. Indeed, when the powers of the EEOC and OFCC are greatest, the wage effects for young blacks are somewhat perverse. Using EEO-1 reports we find a major shift in black employment toward firms most vulnerable to the monitoring and potential sanctions of the affirmative action programs. As with wages, the shift in minority employment came prior to the expansion of the powers and budgets of the EEOC and OFCC. We are surprised by the timing of these changes and are concerned about the quality of the EEO-1 reports.

The article discusses the need for a senior level theory seminar in accounting education. The author believes that a senior level theory seminar is a must for the accounting major. Discussion and correspondence with former students and with their employers in public accounting tend to support this opinion. The accounting practitioner is the one who decides upon implementation of change in accounting. Intense exposure to accounting theory increases the probability that the practitioner will initiate needed change. In establishing the classroom atmosphere, two approaches are available: provide direction for the class by having the professor serve as a discussion leader or leave the direction to the students by having the professor--serve as a moderator. Two requisites for the course are class size and room arrangement. A small class size is conducive to achievement of the course purposes. However, some minimum parameter probably is beneficial also. The room arrangement should be one in which the students face one another, enabling the class to quickly overcome the tendency for the student to address the professor rather than his peers.

To arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history, it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure-retrospective years of schooling completed-and Robert Margo's measure-prospective accumulation across ages of cohort-specific attendance rates. My series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre-1940 black-white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences. Margo's series not only would restore that incon

Among the many disturbing changes in the structure of wages in recent years, the stagnation in the male racial wage gap may be the most disheartening. Race remains America's oldest and most persistent cause of social and economic disparity, but many of us had been encouraged by the steady and significant economic progress since the Second World War. The recent stagnation challenges that optimism. In this paper, I attempt to identify the reasons why the wage stagnation took place. Many Americans, particularly those in the media and political arena, believe they already know the reason. According to them, this stagnation is the predictable consequence of the affirmative-action policies associated with the Reagan administration. One reason why many believe that the Reagan era deserves principal responsibility for the racial stagnation is the belief that Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) resources were gutted during this period. EEOC inflation-adjusted budgets grew almost 15 percent per year during the 1970's. While there was some slowdown in the last half of the decade, constantdollar EEOC budgets expanded by 7.2 percent per year during the Carter administration, and almost 1,400 budgeted positions were added to the EEOC (a growth of 50 percent) between 1976 and 1980. There is no question that the Reagan era witnessed an abrupt end to the growth in resources that would have taken place. EEOC constant-dollar budgets actually fell during this period, and the number of positions declined by almost one thousand; and as EEOC resources and personnel fell during the 1980's, so did the measurable outputs. The sharp break in the 1980's was not so much in the aggregate level of activity, but in its composition and the resources available per case. Spurred by the passage of the Age Discrimination Act in 1979, age came into its own during this decade. Starting with only 14 cases in the year after passage of the act, the number of age cases rose at an astonishing pace to over 30,000 by 1992. Even without this explosion in age-related charges, the significance of race was declining. While the number of race charges increased by 10 percent after 1980, sex charges were expanding by 40 percent. By 1992, only 40 percent of all cases involved race issues, compared to 85 percent of all charges in 1970 and 61 percent in 1980. The declining importance of race in the EEOC's agenda reflects a more general dilution of race as the core civil-rights labormarket concern. Since 1965, the road to equal rights has become very crowded. The quest for racial justice was the clear moral force behind the civil-rights act with women added in an unsuccessful attempt to scuttle the legislation. Subsequently, Hispanics have begun to rival blacks in their political clout, and protected minority-group status was extended to men over 40, those with a disability, and gays. The end result is that more than three-quarters of today's labor force enjoy protected minority-group status. Blacks are now a minority within the protected minority class, which itself represents the majority.

While contemporary rhetoric often highlights differences between races, the data show that blacks are becoming less distinguishable from whites in at least one relevant index of performance-market earnings. Relative to white males, black male earnings have gradually increased, and the rise during the 1960's and the early 1970's is larger than that observed earlier. (See Table 1.) Yet, it is clearly the contrast between white and black females that is extraordinary. Twenty years ago the average black woman employed full time was earning approximately half the wage of a similarly employed white woman. By 1975, almost complete racial parity among women had been achieved. In a recent article (1977), Finis Welch and I argued that the advance in the relative income of black males between 1960 and 1970 was due mainly to converging educational distributions by race and a narrowing in wage differentials between regions. Skill levels were relatively constant within cohorts and convergence was accomplished as increasingly similar racial cohorts entered labor markets while other less similar cohorts retired. Finally our test of affirmative action pressures indicated that before 1970 they had little impact. My first objective is to update our previous research to determine if the events of the last decade for males have continued unabated into the mid1970's. Since a complete understanding of the dynamics of blackwhite changes necessitates explaining the patterns for females, my second goal is to expand the wage comparisons to include women. The major explanations for narrowing in racial wage differences can be placed under four general categories. The central idea of the vintage hypothesis is that more recent black cohorts begin their job experiences with larger initial stocks of human capital, relative to whites, than previous cohorts. The second explanation involves migration. The rural-South to urban-North migration has partly been superceded by southern blacks moving to what are by now economically vibrant southern cities. The third category involves the effects of government affirmative action. Since 1970, it is alleged that a series of court cases imposing severe financial penalties on firms for noncompliance with affirmative action goals have added sharp teeth to government jaw boning. Finally, changes in other aspects of market work may be important in narrowing relative wages. This factor is more relevant for women than men and includes the choice of partor full-time work, unique characteristics of certain occupations, and biases due to limiting comparisons solely to working women.