Collaborative Research: The Impacts of Racial Discrimination on Housing Choice and Economic Well-Being in the United States

该奖项资助研究租房者如何选择居住地。居住地点的选择对美国家庭来说是一个重要的经济决策。租房者根据他们的预算寻找最能满足他们需求的房子。这包括考虑可负担性、公寓或房子的细节，以及期望的社区特色。然而，一些租房者可能会面临房东和物业经理的歧视。住房市场的歧视可能会引导租房者进入特定的社区，扭曲寻找住房的过程。该项目旨在了解可能的歧视如何影响搜索过程。该团队将进行一项创新的实地实验，以了解歧视如何影响寻房者。该小组将利用研究结果对租房市场歧视的社会成本进行估算。该项目将为改善公平住房政策提供新的见解。关于住房市场歧视的实验研究忽略了住房搜索的作用，难以将歧视行为对家庭分类的影响与区位特征的影响区分开来。本项目将在线租赁住房平台的实地实验与考虑住房搜索的福利理论框架相结合。实地试验将利用超级计算基础设施的创新用途，向出租房屋列表发送查询。通过检查房东和物业经理如何回应租赁咨询，他们将能够评估可能存在的歧视对一些租房者面临的选择集的影响。福利理论方法解释了歧视对多重邻里特征的影响。目前尚不清楚歧视是否不成比例地阻碍了那些偏爱住房或社区某些属性的家庭的选址决策：经济适用房、学校质量、安全社区或有害污染暴露。该项目将研究某些类型的租房者是否受到住房市场歧视行为的不成比例的影响。最后，该项目将使我们更准确地估计住房歧视造成的社会福利损失。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award funds research on how renters choose where to live. The choice of residential location is a critical economic decision for households in the United States. Renters search for housing that best meets their needs given their budget. This includes considering affordability, the specifics of the apartment or house as well as desired neighborhood features. However, some renters may face discrimination from landlords and property managers. Housing market discrimination could steer renters into specific neighborhoods and distort the housing search process. This project seeks to understand how possible discrimination affects the search process. The team will conduct an innovative field experiment to see how discrimination affects housing searchers. The team will use the results to develop estimates of the social costs of discrimination in rental housing markets. The project will yield new insights to improve fair housing policy.Experimental research on discrimination on housing markets has ignored the role of housing search, making it difficult to disentangle the effect of discrimination behavior on household sorting from the effects of location characteristics. This project integrates a field experiment with an online rental housing platform with a welfare-theoretic framework that takes housing search into account. The field experiment will make use of an innovative use of supercomputing infrastructure to send inquiries to rental housing listings. By examining how landlords and property managers respond to rental inquiries, they will be able to evaluate the impacts of possible discrimination on the choice sets faced by some renters. The welfare-theoretic approach accounts for impacts of discrimination on multiple neighborhood characteristics. It is currently unclear whether discrimination disproportionately hinders the location decisions of households who have preferences for certain attributes of housing or neighborhoods: affordable housing, school quality, safe neighborhoods, or harmful pollution exposures. This project will examine whether certain types of renters are disproportionately affected by discriminatory behavior in the housing market. Finally, the project will give us more accurate estimates of the lost social welfare from housing discrimination.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.