Cities and their surrounding suburbs provide the homes, workplaces, and social and educational environments for most individuals and families in developed nations, but these urban areas are typically characterized by substantial stratification across racial, ethnic, and economic groups and...

The Housing Discrimination Study 2000 (HDS 2000) is the third nationwide effort sponsored by HUD to measure the amount of discrimination faced by minority home seekers. This report provides national estimates of discrimination faced by African Americans and Hispanics in 2000 as they searched for...

This paper studies the impact of capital requirements, deposit insurance and tax benefits on a bank's capital structure. We find that properly regulated banks voluntarily choose to maintain capital in excess of the minimum required. Central to this decision is both tax advantaged debt (a source...

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the evidence on housing and mortgage lending discrimination, as well as the potential impacts of such discrimination on minority outcomes like homeownership and neighborhood environment. The paper begins by discussing conceptual issues surrounding...

This paper was prepared as part of a National Resource Council workshop on the use of paired testing to study measure racial and ethnic discrimination in housing markets. The paper first introduces the concept of paired testing, reviews the major issues surrounding its use, and discusses several...

Increasing levels of segregation in American schools raises the question: do home buyers pay for test scores or demographic composition? This paper uses Connecticut panel data spanning eleven years from 1994 to 2004 to ascertain the relationship between property values and explanatory variables...

Using paired testing data from the 1989 and 2000 Housing Discrimination Studies (HDS) and data on fair housing enforcement activities during the 1990s in the corresponding metro areas, we investigate whether 1989-2000 changes in the metropolitan incidence of racial/ethnic discrimination...

This paper examines whether the voter with the median income is decisive in local spending decisions. Previous tests have relied on cross-sectional data while we make use of a pair of California referenda to estimate a first difference specification. The referenda proposed to lower the required...

Researchers have long recognized that the non-random sorting of individuals into groups generates correlation between individual and group attributes that is likely to bias naive estimates of both individual and group effects. This paper proposes a non-parametric strategy for identifying these...

Recent theoretical models and empirical analyses argue that mortgage market activity creates information and lowers the costs of underwriting mortgages. We re-examine this question using models that control for neighborhood-lender fixed effects and address the potential endogeneity of market...