When should the government intervene to fulfil affirmative action goals? This paper addresses this question in a dynamic model of education and employment. We compare the effects of implementing affirmative action in university admissions and labor market hiring. The informational advantage of selective universities over the firms regarding the quality of the students’ grade schools is identifi...

In his article Class in American Legal Education, Professor Richard Sander highlights the lack of class diversity within law schools in the United States, particularly within elite law schools. As Sander points out, law students tend to come from relatively elite class backgrounds, and Sander urges law schools to pursue class-based affirmative action, rather than race-based affirmative action, ...

Faced with legal challenges to explicitly race-contingent admissions policies, elite educational institutions have turned to criteria that meet diversity goals without being formally contingent on applicant identity. We establish that under weak conditions that apply generically, such color-blind affirmative action policies must be nonmonotone, in the sense that within each social group, some s...

Gender differences in susceptibility to coronary heart disease have been firmly established: the incidence of various manifestations of coronary atherosclerosis is less in premenopausal women than age-matched men. The protective role of estrogen covers a broad range of mechanisms including improvement of endothelial regeneration after arterial injury. Mediated primarily by the estrogen receptor...

Is there anything new to say about affirmative action? As a purely legal matter, the answer is probably “Not much.” The story of current doctrine and its evolution is widely known and obsessively recounted, and the commentary on that story is voluminous. The majority and dissenting opinions in the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin represent the latest attempt t...