Rising returns to education are said to arise partly from improvements in the quality of southern black schools over the first half of the twentieth century. This paper reexamines the empirical support for these findings with special consideration given to the role of functional form assumptions and sample inclusion criteria in generating them. It shows that estimates obtained by standard wage decomposition methods can be highly sensitive to restrictions on functional form. Seemingly innocuous sample inclusion restrictions, such as a lower income bound restriction imposed to guard against outliers, are shown to be an important source of discrepancies across empirical studies. The sources of these improvements are less well understood.
Many scholars implicitly assume improvements in schooling reflect private choices.
In fact, schooling is publicly provided, and increases in the quality and availability of Black schools in the South occurred at a time when Blacks were excluded from the political process. Analyses that pit rising school quality as an alternative to social action in explaining Black progress miss the important role of social activism in promoting schooling quality and hence in elevating the economic status of African Americans. Using a unique data source for South Carolina on wages and employment by race, sex and industry, we evaluate competing explanations. Human capital stories, supply shift stories, and tight labor market stories do not account for the black breakthrough. Our study documents a significant contribution of federal antidiscrimination programs.