Does the number of houses a broker shows depend on a homeseeker's race?

Using audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study and a fixed-effects Poisson model, this paper examines discrimination in the number of houses shown to homeseekers. Unlike previous studies, it considers auditors' actual socioeconomic characteristics to minimize the estimation bias. The results indicate that blacks and Hispanics are shown 30 and 10 percent fewer units, respectively, than whites, whereas there is no similar discrimination against Asians and native Americans. Since 1989, discrimination against blacks has increased by 12 percentage points while discrimination against Hispanics has been unchanged. This paper also finds that brokers discriminate mainly because of white customers' prejudice.