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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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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Molla, Hemrin, Rhawi, Caroline, Lampi, Elina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9176839/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35675272
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268840
Descripción
Sumario: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.