Essays on Neighborhood Transition and Housing Markets
Casey, Marcus D.
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72411
Description
Title
Essays on Neighborhood Transition and Housing Markets
Author(s)
Casey, Marcus D.
Issue Date
2009
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Lubotsky, Darren H.
Department of Study
Economics
Discipline
Economics
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Economics, General
Economics, Theory
Abstract
This dissertation presents new evidence on neighborhood transition and its impact on housing markets using a novel micro-level dataset on housing transactions. It focuses on three issues: the neighborhood effect, housing discrimination, and stable integration. The first essay examines the relationship between increased minority composition and neighborhood housing prices: the neighborhood effect. Here, a two-stage strategy is proposed to estimate the impact of new minority entry on neighborhood price appreciation. Results using data for Chicago suggest minority entry into majority white neighborhoods is not negatively associated with price appreciation. Similar results are found using data from San Francisco and Los Angeles while a small, negative effect is estimated for Baltimore-Washington DC. The essay concludes with a discussion of potential explanations and implications of these results for future research.
The second essay is a co-authored study focusing on potential discriminatory behavior in housing markets. The empirical strategy exploits the availability of buyer and house information for individual repeat sales transactions to determine if minority homebuyers pay premiums relative to whites for comparable housing. The essay finds strong evidence of minority premiums using data from four major metropolitan areas. Black and Hispanic homebuyers pay premiums ranging from 1 to 5 percent relative to white buyers within the same neighborhood. These findings are largely robust across alternative specifications. The results are interpreted as largely consistent with persistent discrimination in housing markets.
The final essay studies the stability of integrated neighborhoods. Existing literature typically defines stable integrated neighborhoods as maintaining composition between 10 and 50 percent black and with population shares that changed no more than 10 percentage points over the previous decade. Using these criteria, the study finds a number of such neighborhoods mostly located in the South and Northeast. Characteristics of these neighborhoods that may promote stability are explored. Then, the essay discusses difficulties in defining stable integrated neighborhoods and finds slight changes in criteria used may affect conclusions from empirical study. Alternative approaches to the study of integration and stability are discussed.
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