Ethnic and gender discrimination in the rental housing market: Evidence from a meta-analysis of correspondence tests, 2006–2017

Abstract

We present a large review of all studies that tested discrimination against minority ethnic groups in the rental housing market with the correspondence tests method. Moreover, we perform a meta-analysis of correspondence tests from 25 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 2006 and 2017, containing more than 300 estimates of effects and representing a total of over 110 000 emails sent to private landlords or real estate agents. In addition to presenting overall results of recent studies, we focus on subgroups of specific correspondence tests in order to highlight the differences across ethnicity, gender, type of landlords, procedure, continent, and type of information provided in applications. We provide evidence that both gender and ethnic discrimination occur in the rental housing market in OECD countries, such that minority-sounding names and male names applicants are discriminated (especially for Arab/Muslim applicants). We show the existence of interactions between ethnic and gender discrimination: gender discrimination is larger for Minority-sounding names than for Majority-sounding names. Thus, ethnic Majority women are the most favored on this market in OECD countries while Minority men are the most disadvantaged. Moreover, we highlight that this discrimination mainly comes from agents' preferences rather than statistical discrimination. Finally, it seems that real estate agents discriminate significantly less minority applicants than private landlords do. These results are robust to the estimation method used (random effects, fixed-effects and unrestricted weighted least squares methods).

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on ethnic discrimination on the housing market

“…When the minority group is significantly worse treated, this is considered as evidence for ethnic discrimination. Correspondence tests are already used for decades to examine discrimination on the housing market (Auspurg et al 2019;Flage 2018;Quillian et al 2020) and are considered as the 'golden standard' to measure discriminatory behaviour (Health and Di Stasio 2019).…”

Price Elasticity of Electricity Demand in France

“…Overall, such applicants are contacted less frequently and the number and quality of goods presented to them are lower. Flage (2018), on the basis of a survey of almost 30 studies using the correspondence test method, concludes that there is a difference up to double between majority and minority ethnic applicants.…”

“…We have decided not to explore the effect of the gender of the applicants, which is a whole separate issue. The extensive overview of the literature by Flage (2018) indicates that men are penalised in the housing market and that such penalties are more pronounced for people of non-French origin. On average, in the 14 studies that have explored this phenomenon, a female applicant has a 30% greater chance of being invited to view an apartment than a male and 50% between male and female applicants who are not of French origin.…”

Perishability, dynamic pricing and price discrimination: evidence from flower markets in Bogotá

“…The explanation is that Asian buyers are more elastic since they resell to estab-lishments located in poorer neighborhoods. Regarding experimental evidence, it is vast for labor and housing markets (Riach and Rich, 2002;Flage, 2018) and is expanding for other markets functioning as online platforms (Besbris et al, 2015;Cui et al, 2020). The evidence is more scarce for LMICs, where audit studies have shed some clues on compliance on the healthcare sector (Currie et al, 2014;Das et al, 2016), gender differences in bargaining behavior (Castillo et al, 2013), and class discrimination in informal trade (Grossman and Honig, 2017).…”