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Labor and Employment Law

Columbia Law School

American Economic Review

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Effect Of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas On The Composition And Quality Of Police, Justin Mccrary Jan 2007

The Effect Of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas On The Composition And Quality Of Police, Justin Mccrary

Faculty Scholarship

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on work-force composition is a 14-percentage-point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers. Evidence on police performance is mixed. Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation. However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees.


On Reanalyzing The Harris-Todaro Model: Policy Rankings In The Case Of Sector-Specific Sticky Wages, T.N. Srinivasan, Jagdish N. Bhagwati Jan 1974

On Reanalyzing The Harris-Todaro Model: Policy Rankings In The Case Of Sector-Specific Sticky Wages, T.N. Srinivasan, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

In a brilliant and pioneering paper, John Harris and Michael Todaro introduced a model with two sectors, manufacturing (urban) and agriculture (rural), a (sticky) minimum wage in manufacturing and consequent unemployment. They also introduced a labor allocation mechanism under which, instead of the usual equalization of actual wages, the actual rural wage was equated with the expected urban wage; the latter was defined as the (sticky) minimum wage weighted by the rate of employment, so that, unlike in the standard rigid-wage models of trade theory (for example, Gottfried Haberler, Bhagwati, Harry Johnson, Louis Lefeber, and Richard Brecher), the unemployment resulting …