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.

While human capital has been used with some success to analyze recent changes in racial income differences, scholars have repeatedly pointed to a major empirical problem that appears to severely limit the historical relevanlce and scope of skill-based theories as applied to racial questions. The challenge they raise is legitimate. Put simply, if measured skill disparities between the races narrowed throughout the twentieth century, why did income ratios first begin to converge in the 1960's? In this paper, I address this question relying on some unexploited census data by race on education, literacy, occupations, and income. Using these data that begin with the 1890 Census, I present new estimates of agespecific relative income positions of black men for all postslavery birth cohorts. In addition to reconciling the apparently inconsistent skill and income series, these income ratios offer a very different historical record than many economists believe to have been the case. To cite a prominent example, Gunnar Myrdal's classic work (1944) saw the economic position of his contemporary black America not only as dismal, but made even more so by its sense of hopelessness, given the absence of any hint of progress or change. While Myrdal's pessimism is understandable, it appears that even in his day seeds had long been sown that were already permanently altering and improving the relative economic status of black men.