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Measuring Housing Discrimination in a National Study Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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4 Defining Housing Discrimination
Pages 21-24

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From page 21...
... Heckman's paper offers the following definition of discrimination: "an otherwise identical person is treated differently by virtue of that person's race or gender, and race and gender by themselves have no direct effect on productivity." According to Heckman, discrimination is the effect of race that arises from a ceteris parities hypothetical experiment in which race is allowed to vary while all other aspects of the individual and circumstances are held constant. DISPARATE TREATMENT VERSUS DISPARATE IMPACT During the discussion of methodological implications of the Phase II audit design, participants explored the differences between disparate treat21
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From page 22...
... During his presentation, Gregory Squires, Department of Sociology, The George Washington University, suggested that, contrary to what some believe, paired testing can potentially uncover the existence of clisparate impact cliscrimination in a given housing market. He asserted that, based on information provided to the minority ancl white auditors during the test, analysts can observe instances of clisparate impact not recorded as clisparate treatment.
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From page 23...
... , the HDS data are used to generate two common alternative measures of differential treatment. The first, gross adverse treatment, measures the frequency of audits in which a white auditor was treated favorably and a minority auditor was treated unfavorably.
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From page 24...
... The hypothesis underlying the net measure is that the frequency with which the minority auditor is treated adversely because of factors unrelated to race can be proxied by the frequency with which the white auditor is treated adversely. Underestimates of discrimination result because instances in which the white auditor is treated less favorably are netted out, even though these differences may be attributable to unobserved adverse treatment of the minority auditor (Ondrich et al., 20001.
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Key Terms

  • disparate impact
  • adverse treatment
  • white auditor
  • minority auditor
  • net measure

  • treated favorably
  • differential treatment
  • treated adversely
  • gross measure
  • net adverse

  • white auditors
  • housing discrimination
  • home seekers
  • racial discrimination
  • housing providers

  • housing act
  • nondiscriminatory disparate
  • nondiscriminatory racial
  • disparate treat
  • methodological implications

  • providers deny
  • versus disparate
  • workshop remarks
  • housing unavailable
  • auditor information

  • factors unrelated
  • fair housing
  • alternative measures
  • discrimination result
  • paired testing


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