Working Papers
This paper proposes a novel empirical strategy to estimate the causal effects of federal “redlining” – the mapping and grading of US neighborhoods by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). In the late 1930s, a federal agency created color-coded maps to summarize the financial risk of granting mortgages in different neighborhoods, together with forms describing the presence of racial and ethnic minorities as “detrimental”. Our analysis exploits an exogenous population cutoff: only cities above 40,000 residents were mapped. We employ a difference-in-differences design, comparing areas that received a particular grade with neighborhoods that would have received the same grade if their city had been mapped. The control neighborhoods are defined using a machine learning algorithm trained to draw HOLC-like maps using newly geocoded full-count census records. Our findings support the view that HOLC maps further concentrated economic disadvantage. For the year 1940, we find a substantial reduction in property values and a moderate increase in the share of African American residents in areas with the lowest grade. Such negative effects on property values persisted until the early 1980s. The magnitude of the results is higher in historically African American neighborhoods. The empirical results show that a government-supplied, data-driven information tool can coordinate exclusionary practices and amplify their consequences.Work in Progress
The Long Term Effects of Exposure to Non-Traditional Family Structures.
Single-mother households have become common in the US over the past fifty years. Economists, sociologists, and psychologists have documented that children from single-headed families have lower intergenerational mobility because of a lack of resources and the type of parenting they receive. However, little is known about the effects of children from single-mother families on their school peers. Taking advantage of the Add Health panel data structure, I estimate the effect of this feature of the adolescents’ social environment on educational achievement and long-run labor market outcomes. My identification strategy is based on cohort-to-cohort variation in the percentage of children without a father figure within a school. The preliminary estimates indicate that exposure to peers with a higher rate of father absence does not have much of an effect on education, employment, or wages.