Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-15T07:36:53.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Discrimination in public accommodations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2020

Anna Harvey Open the ORCID record for Anna Harvey [Opens in a new window]  and
Emily A. West
Anna Harvey*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York, NY, USA
Emily A. West
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: anna.harvey@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite widespread belief in the efficacy of statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, including protections for the use of privately provided yet publicly available services such as transportation, hotels, and restaurants, we lack causal estimates of the impacts of these statutes on the well-being of those they are designed to protect. We leverage the US Supreme Court's 1883 strike of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, along with variation in state-level statutes, to identify the impact of the Act's public accommodations provisions. Using a panel of repeated geo-located medical exams of US Colored Troops (USCT) and white Union Army veterans, and a series of difference-in-differences, geographic regression discontinuity, and placebo designs, estimates consistently suggest that the Court's ruling led to meaningful weight losses for USCT veterans in states without state-level public accommodations statutes. These findings suggest that statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations can have significant positive impacts on the well-being of those they are designed to protect.

Keywords

Raceclass and ethnicityAmerican politics
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 597 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Calonico, S, Cattaneo, MD and Titunik, R (2014) Notes and comments: robust nonparametric confidence intervals for regression-discontinuity designs. Econometrica 82, 2295–2326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calonico, S, Cattaneo, MD, Titunik, R and Farrell, MH (2019) Regression discontinuity designs using covariates. Review of Economics and Statistics 101, 442–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calonico, S, Cattaneo, MD and Farrell, MH (2020) Optimal bandwidth choice for robust bias-corrected inference in regression discontinuity designs. The Econometrics Journal, utz022, https://doi.org/10.1093/ectj/utz022.Google Scholar
Cascio, E and Washington, E (2014) Valuing the vote: the redistribution of voting rights and state funds following the voting rights act of 1965. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 376–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cascio, E, Gordon, N, Lewis, E and Reber, S (2010) Paying for progress: conditional grants and the desegregation of southern schools. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, 445–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chay, KY (1998) The impact of federal civil rights policy on black economic progress: evidence from the equal employment opportunity act of 1972. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 51, 608–632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1918) Negro population: 1790–1915. Available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000053752499;view=1up;seq=13.Google Scholar
Floud, R, Fogel, RW, Harris, B and Hong, SC (2011) The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fogel, RW (2004) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America and the Third World. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, PS (1973a) The battle to end discrimination against negroes on Philadelphia streetcars (Part 1): background and beginning of the battle. Pennsylvania History 40, 260–290.Google Scholar
Foner, PS (1973b) The battle to end discrimination against negroes on Philadelphia streetcars (Part II): the victory. Pennsylvania History 40, 354–379.Google Scholar
Foner, E (1988) Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Franklin, JH (1974) The enforcement of the civil rights act of 1875. Prologue Magazine 6, 225–235.Google Scholar
Gillette, W (1979) Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, F (1919) The Development of State Legislation Concerning the Free Negro. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Keele, LJ and Titiunik, R (2015) Geographic boundaries as regression discontinuities. Political Analysis 23, 127–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keele, L and Titiunik, R (2016) Natural experiments based on geography. Political Science Research and Methods 4, 65–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keele, L, Titiunik, R and Zubizaretta, JR (2015) Enhancing a geographic regression discontinuity design through matching to estimate the effect of ballot initiatives on voter turnout. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Statistics in Society, Series A 178, 223–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keele, L, Lorch, S, Passarella, M, Small, D and Titiunik, R. (2017) An overview of geographically discontinuous treatment assignments with an application to children's health insurance. In Cattaneo, MD and Escanciano, JC (eds). Regression Discontinuity Designs: Theory and Applications; Advances in Econometrics, vol. 38. West Yorkshire, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited.Google Scholar
Kennedy, R. (2000) The struggle for racial equality in public accommodations. In Grofman, B (ed), Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Chapter 8 edn, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, pp. 156–166.Google Scholar
Locher, JL, Ritchie, CS, Roth, DL, Baker, PS, Bodner, EV and Allman, RM (2005) Social isolation, support and capital and nutritional risk in an older sample: ethnic and gender differences. Social Science and Medicine 60, 747–761.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logue, LM and Blanck, PD (2010) Race, Ethnicity and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marmot, M (2005) The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity. New York: Henry Holt and Co.Google Scholar
Painter, N (1977) Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Pascoe, EA and Smart Richman, L (2009) Perceived discrimination and health: a meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin 135, 531–554.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rabinowitz, HN (1978) Race Relations in the Urban South 1865–1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
U.S. National Library of Medicine (2019) Is height determined by genetics? Available at https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/height.Google Scholar
Williams, DR and Mohammed, SA (2009) Discrimination and racial disparities in health: evidence and needed research. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 32, 20–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wright, GC (1985) Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky 1865–1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, G (2013) Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Harvey and West Supplementary Materials

Harvey and West Supplementary Materials

Download Harvey and West Supplementary Materials(PDF)
PDF 339.4 KB
Supplementary material: Link

Harvey and West Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WQEZKP
Link