Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Firm Behavior, and Employment Outcomes
Publication Date
1-1-2011
Grant Type
Early Career Research Award
Description
In the last fifty years, the federal government has enacted several pieces of legislation to protect vulnerable groups of workers. Beginning in 1964, the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin in employment decisions. Older workers were added as a protected group in 1967 through the Age Discrimination Act. The proposed project will explore how these and other Equal Employment Opportunity Commission laws influence the employment outcomes of protected groups by exploiting the fact that the laws only apply to businesses that have at least fifteen or more employees. The project will draw on a matched employer-employee panel derived from two confidential Census datasets: the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD).