ABSTRACT
Academic economists have long been interested in the effects of state and federal antidiscrimination protection on the labor market opportunities of demographically identifi able groups such as women, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and disabled people. Previous research, for example, has shown that civil rights protection for African Americans has been effective at improving economic outcomes (see, for example, Chay 1998). In other cases, researchers have suggested that antidiscrimination protection brings “unintended consequences” for the targeted benefi ciaries. Indeed, researchers have attributed some of the relative employment declines of disabled workers in the 1990s to the Americans with Disabilities Act (DeLeire 2000; Acemoglu and Angrist 2001).
