Enforcement Risk and Screening in Rental Markets: Evidence from Eviction Moratoria

Alina Arefeva, Qihui Hu and Christopher Timmins

No 32289, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study how contract enforcement shapes screening by intermediaries in the U.S. rental market, where eviction enforces leases and tenant selection is delegated to property managers. We combine a hand-collected record of state eviction moratoria with a nationwide field experiment of more than 25,000 inquiries. Exploiting staggered moratorium expirations, we show that property managers discriminated more while eviction was unenforceable, redirecting responses from African American toward white applicants without changing their overall responsiveness. The reallocation altered who ultimately moved in and is consistent with statistical discrimination: a benefit–cost calculation shows that the screening was privately profitable despite being illegal.

JEL-codes: D83 G18 G21 G32 J15 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32289.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32289

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32289

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().