Ethnic and Gender Discrimination in Rental Housing Market, Evidence from Meta-Analysis of Correspondence Tests, 2006-2017

We present a large review of all studies that tested discrimination against minority ethnic groups in the rental housing market with the correspondence tests method. Moreover, we perform a meta-analysis of correspondence tests from 25 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 2006 and 2017, containing more than 300 estimates of effects and representing a total of over 110 000 emails sent to private landlords or real estate agents. In addition to presenting overall results of recent studies, we focus on subgroups of specific correspondence tests in order to highlight the differences across ethnicity, gender, type of landlords, procedure, continent, and type of information provided in applications. We provide evidence that both gender and ethnic discrimination occur in the rental housing market in OECD countries, such that minority-sounding names and male names applicants are discriminated (especially for Arab/Muslim applicants). We show the existence of interactions between ethnic and gender discrimination: gender discrimination is larger for Minority-sounding names than for Majority-sounding names. Thus, ethnic Majority women are the most favored on this market in OECD countries while Minority men are the most disadvantaged. Moreover, we highlight that this discrimination mainly comes from agents's preferences rather than statistical discrimination. Finally, it seems that real estate agents discriminate significantly less minority applicants than private landlords do. These results are robust to the estimation method used (random effects, fixed-effects and unrestricted weighted least squares methods).