Discrimination in the rental housing market: A field experiment on the Internet

This paper presents a field experiment on discrimination in the housing market, using the Internet as a research platform. The procedure involved our creating three fictitious persons with distinctive sounding ethnic and gender names. These individuals applied for vacant rental apartments in Sweden that were advertised by landlords on the Internet. Our findings show that the Arabic/Muslim male received far fewer call backs, enquiries, and showings than the Swedish male. Our observations also indicate that the Swedish female met with less difficulty in terms of finding an apartment than the Swedish male. Thus, based on our findings, we conclude that ethnic, as well as gender discrimination exists in the Swedish rental housing market.