Cecilia A. Conrad

The impact of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) on university and professional school admissions and the implications for the California Economy

Using data from the University of California and results from previously published research on the returns to higher education, this article presents a preliminary evaluation of the impact of ending affirmative action in admissions at a large, publicly funded university. At the undergraduate level, eliminating race as a factor in the admissions process will redistribute African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans away from the most competitive campuses (UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-San Diego) towards the less competitive campuses in the California State University system. This redistribution will lower the returns to schooling for those affected groups and could have a negative impact on the educational environment for all students. Affirmative action will, in the short run, reduce the number of African American, Mexican American, and Native American students admitted and, in the long run, will have an adverse effect on the delivery of legal and health care services to those racial and ethnic groups.

A Different approach to the measurement of income inequality

This article presents Atkinson indices of racial income inequality for 1954-1989. This approach permits the study of racial inequality and inequality in the overall distribution of income in a consistent framework. The Atkinson index shows that progress towards racial equality stopped much earlier than observation of mean income ratios would suggest and that most of the gains have been eroded.

Nea presidential address, 1993: Why black economists?

This article looks, with humor, at the role of black economists in academia and in the economics profession.

How to Mobilize Philanthropy to Advance Racial Equity? A Call to Action

Only 3% of the 1,904 submissions to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s historic competition for a single grant of US

Feminist Economics: Second Wave, Tidal Wave, or Barely a Ripple?

100 million, 100&Change, proposed work to address racial equity in the United States. Through a close examination of these submissions, this 2018 Samuel V. Westerfield lecture presents a taxonomy of the work of nonprofits working to address racial equity and an analysis of the weaknesses in their submitted applications. The lecture concludes these applications would have been stronger if there were greater engagement between social sector organizations and academic economists. The lecture issues a call to action for economists to communicate beyond an academic audience, to form partnerships with nonprofit organizations, and to move beyond applied economics to translational economics.

The Complexities and Potential of Theorizing Gender, Caste, Race, and Class

In this chapter, Cecilia Conrad discusses the influence of Second-Wave Feminism in the area of labor economics and on the discipline of economics itself. Conrad argues that Second-Wave feminists and the awareness they brought to gender-based pay differentials served as a catalyst for additional research on women’s participation in the labor force and increasing numbers of women becoming economists. Moreover, not only did more women become economists, but also the field developed feminist challenges to dominant economic paradigms. While proponents of the leading economic theories often attribute pay differentials to differences between men and women in their education levels, their experiences, and their overall productivity, proponents of feminist economic theory argue that these explanations are incomplete and that at least some of the pay gap between men and women is the result of sexism, patriarchy, and discrimination.