NBER Working Papers · 2026 · [{"name": "Lukas Althoff", "affiliation": []}, {"name": "Christiane Szerman", "affiliation": []}]
中文摘要
二战《退伍军人权利法案》（GI Bill）是美国历史上规模最大的教育补贴，也是战后美国向知识经济转型的基石。尽管该计划在形式上不区分种族，但其分权化管理将实施交由地方官员和种族隔离机构负责，对黑人和白人退伍军人产生了截然不同的后果。本文利用围绕二战服役资格截止点的断点回归（RD），并结合一项新的数据链接——将1940年和1950年人口普查中的退伍军人与其儿子在1990年至2025年间的社区结果相匹配——量化了《退伍军人权利法案》对两代黑人和白人美国人经济结果的影响。该法案扩大了种族不平等：白人退伍军人的大学完成率翻倍，而黑人退伍军人则被引向往往具有欺诈性、且没有收入回报的职业培训项目。这些差距跨代持续存在，扩大了儿子成年后社区结果中的白人—黑人差距，其中种族间大学差距扩大了5个百分点（47%）。同等资格下的不平等回报解释了这一代际差距，而战前社会经济地位或地理位置的差异并无贡献。总之，获得《退伍军人权利法案》资格对黑人美国人而言，远非与白人美国人同等的经济机会，这凸显出不区分种族的政策并不能保证种族平等。
Abstract
The World War II GI Bill was the largest education subsidy in US history and a cornerstone of the postwar US transition to a knowledge economy. Although formally race-blind, the program's decentralized administration left implementation to local officials and segregated institutions, with sharply different consequences for Black and white veterans. This paper quantifies the GI Bill's impact on Black and white Americans' economic outcomes across two generations, using a regression discontinuity around WWII service eligibility cutoffs and a new data linkage from veterans in the 1940 and 1950 censuses to their sons' neighborhood outcomes between 1990 and 2025. The GI Bill widened racial inequality, doubling white veterans' college completion while steering Black veterans into often-fraudulent vocational programs with no earnings returns. The disparities persisted across generations, increasing the white-Black gap in sons' adult-neighborhood outcomes, including a 5-percentage-point (47 percent) widening of the racial college gap. Unequal returns to the same eligibility account for the intergenerational gap, with no contribution from prewar differences in socioeconomic status or geography. In sum, access to the GI Bill was not nearly the same economic opportunity for Black Americans as it was for white Americans, highlighting that race-blind policy does not guarantee racial equality.