Do Public Housing Agencies Discriminate Against Latinos? | CU Experts

Overview

Discrimination by political elites has been identified in a variety of earlier studies. However, research about discrimination by street-level bureaucrats has more mixed findings. To contribute to our knowledge about bureaucratic discrimination we conducted a study that followed up on a prior audit of public housing agencies by Einstein and Glick (2017) by making two significant improvements: we pre-test the names used to ensure that they primarily manipulate perceptions of ethnicity, and we include approximately three times more public housing agencies. Our larger sample size produces more precise estimates and allows us to explore potential moderation. We fail to find statistically significant differences in how white and Hispanic aliases are treated across three measures. We also tested for moderation by state-level racial resentment and public housing agency professionalization, but we do not find any meaningful variation across these characteristics.