Chris Timmins - Economics, Duke University
Detecting Discrimination: Combining Experimental and Structural Techniques
Date: 10/14/2021 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Joe Hotz
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: The US has a long history of housing discrimination. Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, HUD has sought to measure the extent of that discrimination with a series of audit studies. Critiques of audit studies have questioned the ability of these and other similar experimental methods to measure discrimination on the margins where individuals are affected in actual market contexts. We implement the largest correspondence study of discrimination in rental housing markets, and show how combining the results with actual market outcomes and with structural estimation techniques can confirm that discrimination indeed has market consequences, and that sorting behavior on the part of market participants can actually make the consequences of that discrimination worse.