Discussion paper

DP9160 The neighbor is king: Customer discrimination in the housing market

This paper provides a method to single out customer-based discrimination in the housing market. We build a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of housing units they own within the same building. Multiple-dwelling landlords discriminate more often than single-dwelling landlords only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. By testing the null hypothesis whereby minority tenants are equally likely to have a multiple-dwelling landlord, we can test whether there is customer discrimination or not. We run the test on French data and show evidence of customer discrimination in the rental market.

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Citation

Combes, P, A TRANNOY, B Decreuse and B Schmutz (2012), ‘DP9160 The neighbor is king: Customer discrimination in the housing market‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 9160. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp9160