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

This paper was previously circulated as “Discrimination During Eviction Moratoria.” We thank Peter Christensen, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Christopher Timmins for sharing the experimental data from the correspondence study on housing discrimination, Coulson, Le, Ortego-Marti, and Shen (2025) for sharing their tenant protection index data, and Kay Jowers for sharing her eviction moratoria data. We are also grateful for feedback from Anthony DeFusco and our discussants Nitzan Tzur- Ilan, Carlos Fernando Avenancio-Le´on, Sofie R Waltl, Matthew Freedman, Robert Collinson, Hanchen Jiang, Andrew Spieler, Boaz Abramson, and Cristian Badarinza. The paper has benefited from the feedback of seminar and conference participants at the UW-Madison, UCLA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, University of North Georgia, College of Charleston, University of North Dakota, University of Nevada, Old Dominion University, the Conference on Auctions, Firm Behavior, and Policy at the University of Oklahoma, the NBER Summer Institute Real Estate Workshop, the Real Estate Finance and Investment Symposium at the University of Cambridge, the UEA Conference, the MFA Conference, the AREUEA National Conference, the CREDA Conference, FMA, the New Economic School, the University of Hawaii, REALPAC, USC, UCRiverside, pre-WFA, and WFA. Ailey Fang and Lucas Marron provided excellent research assistance. The RCT was registered as AEARCTR-0005338 (Sarmiento-Barbieri 2020). The UW-Madison Institutional Review Board determined that this research is exempt from IRB review: submission ID number: 2024-0560. The authors do not have conflicts of interest to disclose. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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