Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910. Part of this early convergence is accounted for by falling white ownership due to movement out of agriculture, but most is accounted for by post-emancipation gains among blacks. After 1910, white and black households increased ownership, but the racial gap barely changed. We discuss the influence of residential segregation, public policy, and permanent income on the ownership gap.

The Political Economy of Fair Housing Laws Prior to 1968

The confluence of the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement propelled the drive for fair-housing' legislation which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African-American population already resided in states with a fair-housing law. Despite laying the political and administrative groundwork for the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, the origins and diffusion of these state laws have not received much attention from scholars, let alone been subject to statistical efforts to disentangle multiple influences. This paper uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of fair-housing legislation to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Ceteris paribus, outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair-housing laws sooner than others. The estimated effects are not undermined by including controls for a variety of competing factors and are supported by historical accounts of the legislative campaigns.

The Four Dimensional Helicity Scheme Beyond One Loop

I describe a procedure by which one can transform scattering amplitudes computed in the four dimensional helicity scheme into properly renormalized amplitudes in the 't Hooft-Veltman scheme. I describe a new renormalization program, based upon that of the dimensional reduction scheme and explain how to remove both finite and infrared-singular contributions of the evanescent degrees of freedom to the scattering amplitude.Comment: 20 page

Distribution of Per Capita Income in Georgia: 1969-2000

Since the mid 1980s, the state of Georgia has been popularly characterized as consisting of two (or more) distinct economies or economic regions, the Atlanta Region and the remainder of the state. Since the appearance of the term "two Georgias" in the local lexicon, policy makers have attempted to address problems associated with the perception that Atlanta and its surrounding counties are experiencing tremendous economic growth, while the remainder of the state languishes. Because the quality and quantity of local public services are determined, in part, by local economic activity, concerns have been raised about the existence of two Georgias and how such an economic partition might affect the distribution of revenue generating capacity among counties across the state.Past research suggests that the average income of different areas of a country tend to converge as overall income rises. Using per capita personal income (PCI) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), we compare 1969 PCI with 2000 PCI to determine: 1) if convergence has occurred 2) how changes in PCI are geographically distributed, and 3) whether these data support the popular conception that Georgia consists of two separate economies. Report #9

Race and the Value of Owner-Occupied Housing, 1940-1990

The racial gap in the value of owner occupied housing has narrowed substantially since 1940, but this narrowing has not been even over time or across space. The 1970s stand out as an unusual decade in which the value gap did not narrow despite continued convergence in the observed characteristics of housing. A decline in the relative value of black-owned homes in central cities appears to have offset gains elsewhere during the 1970s, and this central city decline continued into the 1980s. In further exploration of the 1970s, we find evidence of a rising propensity for higher-income blacks to live in the suburbs. We also find a positive correlation between riots in the 1960s and widening of the value gap during the 1970s in a panel of cities.

The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots: Evidence from Property Values

In the 1960s numerous cities in the United States experienced violent, race-related civil disturbances. Although social scientists have long studied the causes of the riots, the consequences have received much less attention. This paper examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the riots' impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property. Both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimates indicate that the riots depressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound in the 1970s. Analysis of household-level data suggests that the racial gap in the value of property widened in riot-afflicted cities during the 1970s.

Historical Perspectives on Racial Differences in Schooling in the United States

African-Americans entered the post-Civil War era with extremely low levels of exposure to schooling. Relying primarily on micro-level census data, we describe racial differences in literacy rates, school attendance, years of educational attainment, age-in-grade distributions, spending per pupil, and returns to literacy since emancipation, with emphasis on the pre-1960 period. The overwhelming theme is one of educational convergence, despite overt discrimination for much of the period studied, and subject to several qualifications. We interpret this theme in light of a simple model of educational attainment.

Exploring the Racial Gap in Infant Mortality Rates, 1920-1970

This paper examines the racial gap in infant mortality rates from 1920 to 1970. Using state-level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita, we can account for a large portion of the racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945, but a smaller portion thereafter. We re-examine the post-war period in light of trends in birth weight, smoking, air pollution, breast-feeding, insurance, and hospital births.