Abstract:The federal Empowerment Zone (EZ) program is a set of tax incentives targeted to areas of select cities. I estimate the effect of the EZ program on employment, poverty, and property values by comparing areas that received an EZ to areas that applied (and qualified), but were rejected. Because of endogeneity concerns, I use political representation to instrument for EZ designation. OLS results show a positive and statistically significant effect of the program on employment and poverty. IV estimates suggest the program had no effect on employment and poverty, and instead had a large statistically significant effect on property values. JEL Classification: H25; H53; H43; R5; J38 Keywords: Empowerment zone; Regional policy; Wage subsidy; Poverty reduction I would like to thank Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Pete Wilcoxen, John Yinger, Jeff Kubik, Jeff Clemens, Geoffrey Turnbull, Daniel McMillen, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank administrators at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for assistance with data collection.2

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This paper estimates spillover effects from a spatially-targeted redevelopment program, the Federal Empowerment Zone (EZ), on neighboring and economically similar areas. EZs are a set of generous tax incentives and grants aimed at small, economically depressed areas of large U.S. cities. We find areas that border or are economically similar to EZ locations experience a decline in the number of establishments and employment compared to areas that border or are similar to rejected EZ applicants. We also demonstrate that using spillover prone areas to estimate program effects causes upward bias when the spillover is negative. We find that for many of our estimates, spillovers more than offset positive program effects, although there are instances when the net effect is small and positive.

We design and implement an experimental test for differential response by mortgage loan originators (MLOs) to requests for information about loans. Our e-mail correspondence experiment is designed to analyze differential treatment by client race and credit score. Our results show net discrimination by 1.8% of MLOs through non-response. We also find that MLOs offer more details about loans and are more likely to send follow up correspondence to whites. The effect of being African American on MLO response is equivalent to the effect of having a credit score that is 71 points lower.

This paper examines how offering tax incentives in a local area affects the entry of new business establishments. We use the federal Empowerment Zone (EZ) program as a natural experiment to test this relationship. Using instrumental variables estimation, we find that the EZ wage tax credit is responsible for attracting about 2.2 new establishments per 1,000 existing establishments, or a total of 20 new establishments in EZ areas. New establishment growth is strongest in the retail (about 40 new establishments) and service (about five new establishments) sectors, and offset by declines or slower growth in other industries.

Abstract:This paper examines the potential for location-based employment tax incentives to have a differential effect on establishment location and employment across industry sectors. We model the differential effect of the location-based federal Empowerment Zone (EZ) wage tax credit on equilibrium labor and total cost savings across industry sectors. The model guides our empirical work, as we test the effect of the program across industry sectors. Our empirical analysis shows that location based-tax incentives have a positive effect on firm location in some of the industries our model predicts and a negative effect in industries that could be crowded out.

-This paper uses a recent increase in

This article tests for discrimination against Hispanics in the U .S . rental housing market using e-mail correspondence with landlords advertising units online. We divide Hispanics into two groups: those that appear assimilated into American culture and recent immigrants. We find little difference in the treatment of assimilated Hispanics and whites; however, Hispanics we portray as recent immigrants receive less favorable treatment with margins of net discrimination as large as 6.89% of landlords. We also find discrimination varies significantly at the region level and by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods.