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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
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author Molla, Hemrin
Rhawi, Caroline
Lampi, Elina
author_facet Molla, Hemrin
Rhawi, Caroline
Lampi, Elina
author_sort Molla, Hemrin
collection PubMed
description 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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spelling pubmed-91768392022-06-09 Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market Molla, Hemrin Rhawi, Caroline Lampi, Elina PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2022-06-08 /pmc/articles/PMC9176839/ /pubmed/35675272 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268840 Text en © 2022 Molla et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Molla, Hemrin
Rhawi, Caroline
Lampi, Elina
Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title_full Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title_fullStr Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title_full_unstemmed Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title_short Name matters! The cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the Swedish private housing market
title_sort name matters! the cost of having a foreign-sounding name in the swedish private housing market
topic Research Article
url 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
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