Kostnaden av att heta Ali på svensk bostadsmarknad - Ett fältexperiment om etnisk diskriminering vid andrahandsuthyrning på Blocket.se

Abstract

The aim of the study is to investigate if discrimination occurs at the Swedish housing market for sublet at Blocket.se. The study applied an experimental design and thereby created four fictional men who signal four different ethnicities; Swedish, Arabic, Serbian and Chinese ethnicity. The names only signal the ethnic background and are not intended to illustrate whether the person is born or immigrated to Sweden. For the experiment, three different but as equal as possible application letters were randomly sent from the four fictional persons to 620 landlords in region of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Skåne. Unique for this study is that all applications for housings have taken place in six different applicant combinations. In that way the study can interpret if call back rates are affected by the ethnicity they compete with. The result has been analyzed from taste-based and statistical discrimination theory in order to study how discrimination is expressed. The result shows that the individual who signal Swedish ethnicity received most call backs, while the individual who signals Arabic ethnicity received least call backs. Based on our findings, we did observe that ethnic background does affect the call back rate for sublet at the Swedish housing market, although there are difficulties to determine which form of discrimination it is.