Seminar: Blacks, Whites, and Brown: Effects on the Earnings of Men and Their Sons

ABSTRACT: Fifty years ago, Brown v. Board of Education forged legal history. Yet the cases themselves did very little to integrate schools. Economists therefore have viewed Brown as largely symbolic and focused instead upon the effect of realized integration, which did not begin in earnest until a decade or more after Brown. We are the first to examine the impact of Brown itself. We find that earnings are higher the longer a black man was exposed to post-Brown primary and secondary schools. We also discover that Brown particularly affected black men who lived in states that showed greater openness to desegregation efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. We speculate that these positive earnings effects reflect a hope for future change, both in schools and the workplace, which provided incentives to acquire more human capital. By exploiting intergenerational linkages in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we further find weak evidence that Brown increased earnings for a second generation of black men – the sons of post-Brown fathers. This may indicate relaxed credit constraints due to the larger earnings for the first generation. Given that Brown positively affected both generations, we are not surprised to find no significant influence upon intergenerational mobility.

A copy of the paper is available through the Carleton College Department of Economics Working Paper Series.

MPC Seminars are held in 50 Willey Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota Minneapolis Campus.