Ethnic Discrimination : A study about housing plots in municipalities

Abstract: This study presents an investigation of ethnic discrimination in municipalities, by conducting a corresponding test, asking for information about available housing plots, and further examines if the municipalities are contributing to the ethnic discrimination in the housing market. The experiment was conducted by creating two fictitious couples, one Arabic and one Swedish, which was used in the emails, which then was sent out to all municipalities in Sweden. The corresponding test measured the callback rate, the time to receive a reply from the municipality and excluded auto generated replies from the municipalities. We present evidence of ethnic discrimination in the treatment of non natives, using the variable Reply, we found that the Arabic couple were being discriminated against on a 5 percent significance level, with them getting 8,62 percent less answers, Thus, the study's findings indicate that the Arabic couple is being disfavored, relative to the Swedish couple, when emailing municipalities. We conclude that municipalities, could be a contributing factor to the existing ethnic discrimination of non natives in the housing market.