Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 8;17(6):e0268840. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268840. eCollection 2022.
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.
在过去的 20 年里，瑞典的移民和住房短缺问题迅速加剧。在这项基于互联网的现场实验中，我们调查了在瑞典私人租赁住房市场是否存在基于申请人姓名的歧视。我们随机从四个虚构的、受过高等教育且看似“行为端正”的男性申请人中提交了同等的申请，以此回应了一些随机选择的私人住房广告，从而进行了对应方测试。每个广告房东都收到了来自两个申请人的申请，申请人的名字表明他们来自瑞典、阿拉伯/穆斯林、东欧或东亚族群。我们的结果表明，与主流族群相关联的名字的申请人得到房东回应的次数最多，而名字听起来像是东欧或东亚的申请人，尤其是名字听起来像是阿拉伯/穆斯林的申请人，得到的回应率明显较低。此外，无论与谁配对，每个申请人的回应率都大致相同，这进一步证实了我们的研究结果，即当申请公寓时，申请人的名字确实很重要。与之前关注瑞典住房市场的歧视研究相比，这表明在过去十年中，名字听起来像是阿拉伯/穆斯林的男性申请人的情况在瑞典至少没有改善。
