Testing for Housing Discrimination

Commenting on an article by Sun Jung Oh and John Yinger, Timothy Taylor writes,

Overall, the findings from the 2012 study find ongoing discrimination against blacks in rental and sales markets for housing. For Hispanics, there appears to be discrimination in rental markets, but not in sales markets…

However, the extent of housing discrimination in 2012 has diminished from previous national-level studies.

What was most interesting to me was the method of testing for discrimination, which involved sending pairs of auditors of different races with otherwise identical characteristics to ask real estate agents for help finding apartments or homes. It would be interesting to see such a method applied to mortgage lending, rather than trying to make inferences from observed data.

3 thoughts on “Testing for Housing Discrimination

  1. Overall, the findings from the 2012 study find ongoing discrimination against blacks in rental and sales markets for housing. For Hispanics, there appears to be discrimination in rental markets, but not in sales markets…

    I wonder if one factor is Hispanic-Americans are still heavily populated in certain areas of the nation. (Southwest, Florida, & New York, etc.) So any kind of discrimination in California against Hispanics will have enormous impact on your ability to achieve the highest price.

    I do find it unusual that in 2016 the states Trump is out-performing Romney (Iowa & Maine) are states with the least Hispanic populations.

  2. The claim that the different-race testers are matched on other characteristics is false. They are not matched in a Bayesian-priors sense. Since blacks in America are much more likely to have criminal close relatives, et-cerera, and since “equal” credentials for blacks is well-known to mean “inflated” credentials because of affirmative action, giving testers the “same” nominal qualifications will not counteract entirely justified and rational statistical discrimination against the black testers. The reported experimental design is incapable of distinguishing “skin-color” bias from non-racially-biased discrimination on other factors known to be present but for which controls have been omitted (including, as mentioned, the inferior values of most credentials claimed for the black testers and the imputed cost of antisocial behavior by a black tester’s family and friends, or even the testers themselves in future).

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