Essays in Housing Choices and Consumer Behavior: The Impacts of Borrowing Constraints on the Homeownership of Chinese Households
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Racial differences in the consumption of particular characteristics of houses have largely been neglected in literature. Given homeownership, minorities and whites consume different housing attributes and live in different housing conditions. In Chapter One “The Consumption of Housing Space: Why African-Americans Live in Smaller Units,” I analyze the determinants of housing space demand and decompose the black-white difference in the consumption of housing space into three categories: the endowment effect, behavioral effect, and selectivity effect. Using the 2007 American Housing Survey national data, I identify the demand functions for housing space for both African American households and white households. Next, the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition is used to analyze the black-white gap in housing space consumption. A correction for possible sample selection is included in the model to capture the differences in the housing space consumption between homeowners and non-homeowners. The results show that after controlling for family income and household structure there is still a large portion of the housing space gap that cannot be explained. Income has the largest impact on space consumption among the observed endowments. Racial differences in income account for 24% of the housing space gap. The unexplained portion of the gap is 61%. Forty percent of the unexplained gap is due to differences in the selection processes by which blacks and whites become homeowners.
THES
Economics
Ma, Li
2012
Doctor of Philosophy
123
Ohio State University
1411