Ethnic Discrimination in the London Market for Shared Housing

Abstract

It is well documented that there exists ethnic discrimination in the regular housing market in European and US cities. However, the existing literature has so far neglected the informal market for shared housing. We use a field experiment to investigate ethnic discrimination in this market. We sent fictitious enquiries with a randomly assigned name signalling a British, Eastern European, Indian, African or Arabic/Muslim background to more than 5000 room advertisers in the Greater London Area. Our main finding is that ethnic discrimination is widespread. We also find that the degree of discrimination depends on the applicant's occupation and the ethnic residential concentration.