TY  - JOUR
AU  - Collins,William J.
TI  - The Housing Market Impact of State-Level Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1960-970
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9562
PY  - 2003
Y2  - March 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9562
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9562.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
William J. Collins
Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University
VU Station B #351819
2301 Vanderbilt Place
Nashville, TN 37235-1819
Tel: 615/322-3428
Fax: NA
E-Mail: william.collins@vanderbilt.edu
AB  - This paper measures the housing market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s using household-level and census-tract data. State-level fair-housing' laws attempted to bar discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin in the sale, rental, and financing of housing, and they were the direct antecedents of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their influence on the housing market outcomes of African Americans has not been assessed in previous work by economists, but policy variation across states during the 1960s provides an opportunity to pursue such estimates. During the 1960s, blacks' housing market outcomes improved relative to whites', and the proportion of exclusively white census tracts declined markedly. But I find little evidence that the fairhousing laws contributed to those changes. Rather, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the laws' effects on blacks' housing market outcomes, on residential segregation, and on the value of property in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods were negligible.
ER  -