The long-run effects of the 1930s HOLC “redlining” maps on place-based measures of economic opportunity and socioeconomic success

By Daniel Aaronson, Jacob W. Faber, Daniel A. Hartley, B. Mazumder, Patrick Sharkey. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2020

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Abstract We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps on census tract-level measures of socioeconomic status and economic opportunity from the Opportunity Atlas ( Chetty et al. 2018 ). We use two identification strategies to identify the long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first compares cross-boundary differences along actual HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach uses a statistical model to identify boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC. We find that the maps had large and statistically significant causal effects on a wide variety of outcomes measured at the census tract level for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6447acad64405771dac3edccc5742b97dbc555fd