Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market.

ABSTRACT: 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, whil

SUBMITTER: Molla H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9176839 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature