Replication Study of Cook et al (2023): The Evolution of Access to Public Accomodations in the United States

This is a replication study of Cook et al.(2023), a paper that investigates the determinants of access to nondiscriminatory public accommodations for African-Americans before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They utilize the Negro Motorist Green Books and World War II casualty data to examine the impact of demographic shifts caused by wartime casualties on the prevalence of nondiscriminatory establishments. Using a difference-in-differences approach, they show that a 10% increase in white casualties led to a 0.6% increase in nondiscriminatory businesses. Further, an instrumental variable strategy indicates that a 10% rise in the Black population share correlated with increased nondiscriminatory services. Our replication study shows that the difference-in-differences estimates remain stable even after excluding states with the highest average white World War II casualties or Southern states. However, the instrumental variable estimates become sensitive to the use of robust standard errors. The reproduction of the figures and tables of the paper is mostly accurate, with a minor discrepancy in Table 3 Panel A column 3, where the original coefficient is stated as 0.0191, and the replicated coefficient is found to be 0.0263.