Richard H. Sander

College Major Competitiveness and Attrition from the Sciences

This paper examines how the competitiveness of distinct college majors at a student’s college affects her major choice and other college outcomes. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for very flexible application-admissions pattern fixed effects to account for student unobservables, as well as school-specific fixed effects to account for typically unobservable institutional characteristics that are plausibly correlated with peer quality and student outcomes. We find that students initially interested in pursuing a science major respond to the competitiveness of both the broad science and non-science major tracks. Weaker, non-minority students typically respond to greater competition in the sciences by shifting their major choice. Under-represented minorities tend to persist in the sciences regardless of competition, but suffer -- often substantially -- in terms of college grades and the likelihood of graduating.

Santa Monica’s Minimum Wage: Assessing the Living Wage Movement’s New Frontier

Local campaigns to create high minimum wages in submetropolitan districts have become a growing part of the living wage movement. In this article, the authors examine the structure and likely effects of an ambitious minimum wage ordinance adopted by the Santa Monica City Council in 2001 but narrowly defeated in a citywide referendum in November 2002. Using a range of data sources, the authors find that the ordinance would have had negative, but surprisingly mixed, effects on local business sectors and highly perverse distributional effects. Apart from their merits as policy, local minimum wage laws raise important, little-studied questions for labor and urban economists.

Black Pioneers, Intermetropolitan Movers, and Housing Desegregation

In this project, we examine the mobility choices of black households between 1960 and 2000. We use household-level Decennial Census data geocoded down to the census tract level. Our results indicate that, for black households, one’s status as an intermetropolitan migrant – especially from an urban area outside the South – is a powerful predictor of pioneering into a white neighborhood. Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, the ratio of these intermetropolitan black arrivals to the incumbent metropolitan black population is a powerful predictor of whether a metropolitan area experiences substantial declines in housing segregation.

Edited Transcript of Living Wage Conference Call, February 11, 2004

Bartik: The purpose of this is to have a discussion on the living wage issue that will accompany this collection of articles on the living wage in Economic Development Quarterly. What I envision is not something where we would nitpick fine points of the articles but instead a talk about some of the broader issues that are raised by the articles and by the entire living wage issue. Let’s first talk a little bit about what people see are the most important areas on which this research on the living wage is really in agreement and what are the important areas where we really do disagree, and I’ll leave it open to anyone to start out on that topic. Pollin: I’ll speak up. I think there are some basic factual things that we can all agree on. The first fact that we could all agree on is that the national minimum wage at

Structural versus Ethnic Dimensions of Housing Segregation

5.15 is roughly 40% below where it was in real terms in 1968. If somebody walked into McDonald’s in 1968 and McDonald’s was obeying the law, they would pay someone somewhere on the order of

A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools

8.30 to

Why Are There So Many Lawyers? Perspectives on a Turbulent Market

8.40 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on how you measure inflation, as a minimum wage. The sharp decline in the minimum wage reflects broader trends in society: wage stagnation or decline for most nonsupervisory workers, increased inequality in wage income and wealth, and a basic problem of creating decent jobs. These are some facts that not too many people would disagree with. Yelowitz: The decent jobs thing seems more controversial. Pollin: Okay, I’ll pull that one off the list of agreements. If we can agree at least on some of these basic things about the minimum wage, I think we might agree also that there are real concerns, which I share, as to the efficacy of the minimum wage as a policy intervention or variations of the minimum wage such as the living wage ordinance. These would be the effects on employment, layoffs, and displacement. I think that we agree that there are concerns about the effects of living wage laws on business relocations. We can agree that there are potential effects on government budgets that may be harmful. I think that this group can broadly agree that we would adjudicate these questions through empirical methods, that there isn’t a theoretical model out there that is going to tell us exactly what is right and what is wrong. We are all committed to various forms of empirical research. It’s fair to say that up until at least a couple of years ago, the types of research we did was based on prospective evidence or modeling. We increasingly now use retrospective evidence, like actually observing what happened when living wage laws were implemented. This should be increasingly the focus of anyone researching living wage laws. Toikka: Bob, it’s hard to disagree with much of what you said because it’s so broad, talking about potential effects and so forth. What I’m struck with is how difficult this is as a research question. As someone who was trying to fund living wage research for a number of years, I find the typical response in academia is either “I’m not going to be able to get that published” or “I don’t have

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It

ABSTRACT Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines (what we call structural factors); some portion is caused by purely racial factors, such as housing market discrimination and preferences for the race of one’s neighbors. Past attempts to measure the structural component of segregation have generally focused on only 1 socioeconomic status (SES) variable and have produced results that are high in potential measurement error. In this article, we use an innovative method and uniquely suitable data (geocoded microdata obtained through the U.S. Census Bureau’s Research Data Center [RDC] program) to disaggregate segregation into a “structural” and a residual component. Our measure shows the amount of segregation that would remain if we could randomly assign households to housing units based only on nonracial socioeconomic characteristics. This inquiry provides valuable building blocks for understanding and remedying housing segregation.