Race, Redlining, and Automobile Insurance Prices

Scott E Harrington and Greg Niehaus

The Journal of Business, 1998, vol. 71, issue 3, 439-69

Abstract: Following G. Becker's (1993) suggestion that tests for discrimination should attempt to infer whether profits differ for products sold to minorities and nonminorities, this article tests the hypothesis that racial discrimination affects market prices of auto insurance in Missouri. Compared with tests for discrimination in lending markets, the authors' results are less susceptible to bias from omitted variables. Controlling for available demographic and coverage-related factors, they do not find that loss ratios at the zip-code level are negatively related to percent minority population. This finding is inconsistent with the hypothesis that racial discrimination increases premiums relative to expected claim costs for minorities. Copyright 1998 by University of Chicago Press.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/209751 full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:ucp:jnlbus:v:71:y:1998:i:3:p:439-69

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Business from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().