In 1977, Congress passed the Public Works Employment Act with the goals of providing a six billion dollar stimulus to the economy and offering more self-employment opportunities for minority entrepreneurs. This analysis introduces quantitative support for the claims that affirmative action was warranted prior to the legislation in 1977, and that the policy was indeed successful in encouraging entrepreneurship for minorities and causing a rise in expected wages for minority entrepreneurs. This paper utilizes 1970 and 1980 census data, and employs several difference-in-differences estimators with the intention of capturing the effects seen in self-employment rates and total personal income for different ethnic and racial minority groups targeted for assistance by the Public Works Employment Act.
