Racial climate and homeownership

Timothy F. Harris and Aaron Yelowitz

Journal of Housing Economics, 2018, vol. 40, issue C, 41-72

Abstract: An important question aside from outright discrimination is whether poor underlying race relations in an area might create a chilling effect on homeownership for minorities. From 2012 onward, there were a series of high-profile events in the U.S. related to police brutality which highlighted racial tension. Using Google Trends, we characterize a locality’s underlying racial climate based on search interest in these charged events. We use data from the American Community Survey prior to any of these flare-ups and show that the ownership decision for blacks is responsive to the racial climate; black homeownership in localities with the most charged racial climates is 5.6 percentage points lower than in the least charged racial climates based on a sample of movers.

JEL-codes: J15 K42 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137717301559
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jhouse:v:40:y:2018:i:c:p:41-72

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhe.2017.12.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Housing Economics is currently edited by H. O. Pollakowski

More articles in Journal of Housing Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().