| الوصف: |
There are many policies around the world aimed at integrating groups (gender, ethnic, national) in education, employment, immigration and housing. In the case of housing, since prices may not internalize externalities in residential location choices, we need to know preferences for welfare analysis. This paper estimates people’s taste for living with own ethnic groups (ethnic preferences) using unique policy variation from the ethnic housing quotas in Singapore. My approach combines policy induced variation commonly used in reduced form settings with a non-parametric identi…cation strategy in a structural demand estimation framework à la Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995). I …nd that all groups have strong preferences to live with at least some other members of their ethnic group but the shapes of preferences di¤er. The majority (the Chinese) exhibit preferences that are inverted U-shaped so that after a neighborhood is segregated enough, they have preferences for some diversity. Relative to 3 selected towns where pre-quota data on ethnic proportions was available, I …nd that the quotas have moved the minority proportions more than half way (within 5 percentage points) to the …rst best allocation of ethnic groups. This change is likely to be an upper bound in magnitude because these towns were probably selected because they were more segregated to begin with. I wish to thank my advisors Esther Du‡o, Amy Finkelstein, Panle Jia and Bill Wheaton for guidance and support. I am also deeply indebted to Peter Diamond, Glenn Ellison, Fernando Ferreira, Michael Greenstone, Joe Gyourko, Whitney Newey, Stephen Ryan and Stephen L. Ross for their helpful comments. |
