Working Paper: NBER ID: w9562
Authors: William J. Collins
Abstract: This paper measures the housing market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s using household-level and census-tract data. State-level fair-housing' laws attempted to bar discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin in the sale, rental, and financing of housing, and they were the direct antecedents of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their influence on the housing market outcomes of African Americans has not been assessed in previous work by economists, but policy variation across states during the 1960s provides an opportunity to pursue such estimates. During the 1960s, blacks' housing market outcomes improved relative to whites', and the proportion of exclusively white census tracts declined markedly. But I find little evidence that the fairhousing laws contributed to those changes. Rather, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the laws' effects on blacks' housing market outcomes, on residential segregation, and on the value of property in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods were negligible.
Keywords: housing market; antidiscrimination laws; African Americans; residential segregation
JEL Codes: R3; K31; N42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| state-level fair housing laws (R28) | African Americans' housing market outcomes (R21) |
| state-level fair housing laws (R28) | residential segregation (R23) |
| state-level fair housing laws (R28) | property values in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods (R23) |
| improvements in black housing outcomes relative to whites (R28) | state-level fair housing laws (R28) |
| weak enforcement mechanisms (P14) | limited impact of fair housing laws (R28) |
| deeply rooted discriminatory practices (J71) | limited impact of fair housing laws (R28) |
| improvements in housing market outcomes (R31) | independent factors (C39) |