Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market.
Both immigration and a troubling housing deficit have increased rapidly in Sweden over the past 20 years. In this internet-based field experiment, we investigated whether there exists discrimination in the Swedish private rental housing market based on the names of apartment seekers. We used a corre...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2022-01-01
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| Series: | PLoS ONE |
| Online Access: | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268840&type=printable |
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| Summary: | Both immigration and a troubling housing deficit have increased rapidly in Sweden over the past 20 years. In this internet-based field experiment, we investigated whether there exists discrimination in the Swedish private rental housing market based on the names of apartment seekers. We used a correspondent test by randomly submitting equivalent applications from four fictitious, highly educated, and seemingly "well-behaved" male applicants in response to a number of randomly selected private housing ads. Each advertising landlord received applications from two applicants with names signaling Swedish, Arab/Muslim, Eastern European, or East Asian ethnicity. Our results show that the person with a name associated with the dominant ethnic group received most callbacks from the landlords, while the persons with Eastern European- and East Asian sounding names, and especially the Arab/Muslim-sounding name, yielded significantly lower callback rates. Moreover, each applicant's callback rates are about the same regardless of whom he was paired with, reinforcing our result that a person's name clearly matters when applying for an apartment. The comparisons with previous discrimination research focusing on the Swedish housing market show that the situation for a male person with an Arabic/Muslim-sounding name has at least not improved in Sweden in the past decade. |
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| ISSN: | 1932-6203 |