Northwestern Events Calendar

May
15
2024

Seminar in Economic History

When: Wednesday, May 15, 2024
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Kellogg Global Hub, 2130, 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Mariya Acherkan  

Group: Department of Economics: Seminar in Economic History

Category: Academic

Description:

Aradhya Sood (Toronto): The Long Shadow of Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Racial Covenants 


Abstract: Racial covenants, which were used throughout the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century, were clauses in property deeds that prohibited the sale or rental of property to racial and ethnic minorities. This paper studies the long-run causal and persistent effects of racially restrictive covenants on racial sorting, racial homeown- ership differentials, and house prices. Using novel data on racial covenants and a quasi-experimental design that exploits time to build delays in housing and the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made racial covenants unenforceable, we compare newly built, covenanted (and hence all-white) neighborhoods built before 1948 with covenanted neighborhoods constructed after the verdict, as the post-1948 neigh- borhoods lost a primary legal way to coordinate segregation. We find that about 5-17% of the observed neighborhood racial residential sorting and 6-17% of racial homeownership sorting, measured from 1980 to 2020, can be causally linked to racial covenants of the past. In addition, while the treated and control neighborhoods exhibit some differences in public amenities, particularly in the distance to highways and the restrictiveness of zoning regulations, these differences do not drive the ob- served persistent effects. Instead, homophily bias or unobserved housing quality are the likely drivers behind the persistent effects.

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