The hypothesis that minority voters act in their economic self-interest in supporting municipal candidates of their own race or ethnicity has been tested using changes in municipal spending and employment. However, governments affect voter welfare in many other ways, particularly in the provision of quality public services. This paper exploits a natural experiment arising in 1995 when Congress created an appointed financial control board for the District of Columbia and gave to it many of the powers previously reserved to the local elected government. The natural experiment sets up a triple-difference research design based on changes in property values across District neighborhoods and voting behavior compared to untreated adjacent areas across the District boundary in Maryland. We find that oversight by the control board raised annual appreciation rates in the District by 178 to 254 basis points during the period from 1995 to 2001. Furthermore, effects of the intervention were uniformly positive across areas of the District that varied dramatically in their support for the incumbent administration that lost its powers. This implies, after the fact, that the administration’s supporters had not voted in accord with economic self-interest.

少数族裔选民为了支持自己种族或族裔的市政候选人而出于经济自身利益行事的假说已通过市政支出和就业的变化得到检验。但是，政府通过许多其他方式影响选民的福利，特别是在提供优质公共服务方面。本文利用1995年产生的国会创造了哥伦比亚特区的委任财务控制董事会，并给它很多以前保留给当地民选政府的权力的自然实验。自然实验建立了一个三差研究设计，该模型基于马里兰州跨地区边界上未经处理的相邻区域之间的跨地区邻里的房地产价值变化和投票行为。我们发现，在1995年至2001年期间，控制委员会的监督使该区的年升值率提高了178至254个基点。此外，干预的效果在该区的各个地区都一致地是积极的，它们对地区的支持程度差异很大。失去权力的现任政府。事实上，这意味着政府的支持者没有按照经济自身利益进行投票。