Distributional Effects of Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Impacts on Unemployment Rates Disaggregated By Race and Gender

The use of vectorautoregression techniques provides empirical verification that monetary and fiscal policies do not have equal impacts on unemployment rates disaggregated by race and gender. In general, it was found that white males benefited from macro‐policies more than any other category. However, black females were also shown to benefit significantly. Results were reported from both the 1970s and 1980s and indicate that these differential unemployment rate responses became magnified during the 1980s. The results for white males are consistent with a number of theories that have been offered by several writers, but the results for black females might seem, at first, to be difficult to explain. However, a close inspection of educational attainment scotes for black women over recent decades reveals a potential source of this finding.