Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2017
Abstract
This study evaluates the effects of the recent US housing bust on the White-Black homeownership gap by estimating and decomposing the changes in the distribution of the gap between 2005 and 2011. Our analysis shows that the housing bust did not affect the homeownership gap uniformly. In fact, we find that the gap decreased for households that were the least likely to own and remained unchanged for households that were the most likely to own, and that Black households with around a 50% probability of homeownership were especially vulnerable to the crisis. We also find that the contribution of the residual gap was modest. Changes in the White-Black homeownership gap over the sample period are mainly attributed to changes in household income, whether the household earned dividend, interest or rental income, and marital status, with the extent of their respective influences varying over the homeownership distribution. Our empirical approach reveals distributional information on the determinants of the changes in the homeownership gap at the household level. Such insights have valuable policy implications that would otherwise be concealed in analyses that look only at the conditional mean.
Keywords
Decomposition, homeownership, housing bust, race
Discipline
Race and Ethnicity | Urban Studies
Research Areas
Applied Microeconomics
Publication
Urban Studies
Volume
54
Issue
1
First Page
119
Last Page
136
ISSN
0042-0980
Identifier
10.1177/0042098015619870
Publisher
SAGE Publications (UK and US)
Citation
SEAH, Kiat Ying; FESSELMEYER, Eric; and LE, Kien.
Estimating and decomposing changes in the White-Black homeownership gap from 2005 to 2011. (2017). Urban Studies. 54, (1), 119-136.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research_all/3
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1177/0042098015619870