Search Results
Working Paper
Can Landlords Be Paid to Stop Avoiding Voucher Tenants?
Despite being eligible for use in any neighborhood, housing choice vouchers tend to be redeemed in low-opportunity neighborhoods. This paper investigates whether landlord behavior contributes to this outcome by studying the recent expansion of neighborhood-based voucher limits in Washington, DC. We conduct two waves of a correspondence experiment: one before and one after the expansion. Landlords heavily penalize tenants who indicate a desire to pay by voucher. The voucher penalty is larger in high-rent neighborhoods, pushing voucher tenants to low-rent neighborhoods. We find no evidence that ...
Report
Applications or Approvals: What Drives Racial Disparities in the Paycheck Protection Program?
We use the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to study the sources of racial disparities in use of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Black-owned firms are 8.9 percentage points less likely than observably similar white-owned firms to receive PPP loans. About 55% of this take-up disparity is attributable to a disparity in application propensity, while the remainder is attributable to a disparity in approval rates. The finding in prior research that Black-owned PPP recipients are less likely than whiteowned recipients to borrow from banks and more likely to borrow from fintech lenders is ...
Working Paper
Does Differential Treatment Translate to Differential Outcomes for Minority Borrowers? Evidence from Matching a Field Experiment to Loan-Level Data
This paper provides evidence on the relationship between differential treatment of minority borrowers and their mortgage market outcomes. Using data from a field experiment that identifies differential treatment matched to real borrower transactions in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, we estimate difference-in-difference models between African American and white borrowers across lending institutions that display varying degrees of differential treatment. Our results show that African Americans are more likely to be in a high-cost (subprime) loan when borrowing from lenders that ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Discrimination and the Racial Unemployment Gap: Can Monetary Policy Make a Difference?
Black workers experience a higher unemployment rate, as well as more volatile employment dynamics, than white workers, and the racial unemployment rate gap is largely unexplained by observable characteristics. We develop a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market, endogenous separations, and employer discrimination against Black workers to explain these outcomes. The model is consistent with key features of the aggregate economy and is able to explain key labor market disparities across racial groups. We then use this model to assess the effects of the ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Limiting Applicant Information on Rental Housing Discrimination
Policies that reduce information on applicants (e.g., limiting criminal history) have mixed results in the labor market. However, little is known about their impact in the housing market. We submitted fictitious email inquiries to publicly advertised rentals using names manipulated on perceived race and ethnicity before and after a policy that restricted the use of background checks, eviction history, income minimums, and credit history in rental housing applications in Minneapolis. After the policy was implemented, discrimination against African American and Somali American men increased. ...
Working Paper
Social Externalities of Bank Enforcement Actions: The Case of Minority Lending
This paper studies the role banking supervision plays in improving access to credit for minorities by investigating how enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) affect the bank borrower base. We find that, after an EDO's termination, banks significantly increase residential mortgage lending to minorities, even when the enforcement order is not issued for violations of fair lending laws. Our findings suggest that improvements in banks' internal credit assessment and compliance due to the enforcement process are associated with the expansion in lending to minority borrowers. Our findings ...
Working Paper
Racial Unemployment Gaps and the Disparate Impact of the Inflation Tax
We study the nonlinearities present in a standard monetary labor search model modified to have two groups of workers facing exogenous differences in the job finding and separation rates. We use our setting to study the racial unemployment gap between Black and white workers in the United States. A calibrated version of the model is able to replicate the difference between the two groups both in the level and volatility of unemployment. We show that the racial unemployment gap rises during downturns, and that its reaction to shocks is state-dependent. In particular, following a negative ...
Discussion Paper
The Reluctance of Firms to Interview the Long-Term Unemployed
Estimates from the Current Population Survey show that the probability of finding a job declines the longer one is unemployed. Is this due to a loss of skills from being unemployed, employer discrimination against the long-term unemployed, or are there characteristics of workers in this segment of the workforce that lower their probability of finding a job? Studies that send out fictitious resumes find that employers do consider the length of unemployment in deciding whom to interview. Our recent work examines how such employer screening based on unemployment duration ultimately affects ...
Working Paper
Measuring Fairness in the U.S. Mortgage Market
Black Americans are both substantially more likely to have their mortgage application rejected and substantially more likely to default on their mortgages than White Americans. We take these stark inequalities as a starting point to ask the question: How fair or unfair is the U.S. mortgage market? We show that the answer to this question crucially depends on the definition of fairness. We consider six competing and widely used definitions of fairness and find that they lead to markedly different conclusions. We then combine these six definitions into a series of stylized facts that offer a ...
Working Paper
Racial Unemployment Gaps and the Disparate Impact of the Inflation Tax
We study the nonlinearities present in a standard monetary labor search model modified to have two groups of workers facing exogenous differences in the job finding and separation rates. We use our setting to study the racial unemployment gap between Black and white workers in the United States. A calibrated version of the model is able to replicate the difference between the two groups both in the level and volatility of unemployment. We show that the racial unemployment gap rises during downturns, and that its reaction to shocks is state-dependent. In particular, following a negative ...