Alternative Measures of Homeownership Gaps Across Segregated Neighboorhoods

The dramatic rise in the U.S. homeownership rate from 64% in 1996 to almost 70% in 2005 has prompted increased attention to the relation between homeownership and demographic characteristics of households. The recent rise and sharp decline of subprime lending will likely spur interest in the relation between credit conditions and homeownership gaps. Statistical analysis of these differences or gaps in homeownership between white and minority households follows what has become a highly stylized pattern. Essentially differences in homeownership at the mean or the conditional mean between groups are compared. This study implements a new decomposition technique that identifies the unexplained portion of the gap not only at the mean, but at every percentile of the distribution of the dependent variable. This method was first proposed by Machado and Mata (2005), extended by Albrecht et al. (2006), and has been used in several applications in labor economics. Similar to the labor market application, differences in homeownership gaps at the mean reflect a combination of non- significant differences at the upper end and much larger gaps at the lowest end of the distribution of homeowners.