Replication Data for "Discrimination in Public Accommodations"

Statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations are of considerable policy interest in the United States. However, we lack causal estimates of the impacts of these statutes on the well-being of those they are designed to protect. We leverage the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 accommodation 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.