TY - JOUR
T1 - Housing Discrimination and the Toxics Exposure Gap in the United States: Evidence from the Rental Market
AU - Christensen, Peter
AU - Sarmiento-Barbieri, Ignacio
AU - Timmins, Christopher
N1 - Funding Information:
23Enforcement of antidiscrimination policy is primarily managed by local agencies and funded by grants from the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP). Federal appropriations to the FHIP grew from $24.0 million in 2000 to $42.1 million in 2010 but fell to $39.6 million in 2018.
Funding Information:
We thank David Albouy, Spencer Banzhaf, Pat Bayer, Johnathan Colmer, Rebecca Diamond, Nick Kuminoff, Juan Carlos Serrato, Daniel Sullivan, Reed Walker, Randy Walsh, and seminar participants at NBER Energy and Environmental Economics, the Workshop on Environmental Economics and Data Science, Triangle Resources and Environmental Economics (TREE) Seminar, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara Occasional Workshop in Environmental Economics, UNLV, University of Miami, University of Virginia, and Wharton School for excellent comments. We thank Davis Berlind, Christopher Kim, Daniel Rychel, Tom Phillips, and student assistants in the University of Illinois Big Data and Environmental Economics and Policy Group and the Duke Environmental Justice Lab for research assistance. We acknowledge generous support from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The experiment was registered on the AEA RCT Registry as trial 3366 and the human subjects protocol for this research design was approved by the University of Illinois Institutional Review Board (IRB #18381) on December 7, 2017. All data and code will be available prior to publication using doi:10.5281/zenodo.3987555. All errors are our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2022/7/1
Y1 - 2022/7/1
N2 - Local pollution exposures have a disproportionate impact on minority households, but the root causes remain unclear. This study conducts a correspondence experiment on a major online housing platform to test whether housing discrimination constrains minority access to housing options in markets with significant sources of airborne chemical toxics. We find that renters with African American or Hispanic/Latinx names are 41% less likely than renters with white names to receive responses for properties in low-exposure locations. We find no evidence of discriminatory constraints in high-exposure locations, indicating that discrimination increases relative access to housing choices at elevated exposure risk.
AB - Local pollution exposures have a disproportionate impact on minority households, but the root causes remain unclear. This study conducts a correspondence experiment on a major online housing platform to test whether housing discrimination constrains minority access to housing options in markets with significant sources of airborne chemical toxics. We find that renters with African American or Hispanic/Latinx names are 41% less likely than renters with white names to receive responses for properties in low-exposure locations. We find no evidence of discriminatory constraints in high-exposure locations, indicating that discrimination increases relative access to housing choices at elevated exposure risk.
KW - Housing Discrimination
KW - Air Toxics
KW - Correspondence Experiment
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U2 - 10.1162/rest_a_00992
DO - 10.1162/rest_a_00992
M3 - Article
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 104
SP - 807
EP - 818
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 4
ER -