Contextualizing ethnic discrimination on the rental housing market: the role of local factors to explain and tackle rental discrimination

Contextualizing ethnic discrimination on the rental housing market: the role of local factors to explain and tackle rental discrimination.

2021-2025 | VUB

Summary:

Ethnic discrimination is still a severe problem on the rental housing market. Although previous studies have thoroughly examined the prevalence and patterns of ethnic discrimination on housing markets, there is less research about explaining variation in discrimination and even less about tackling it with evidence-based policies. This project aims to address both major research gaps with a focus on the local context of municipalities. We first examine to which extent four categories of municipality indicators are associated with local rental discrimination and general invitation rates, measured with the field experimental technique of correspondence tests. Then, we distinguish between different types of local anti-discrimination policies in Belgium on the basis of at least six theoretical dimensions. In the third part, we empirically investigate the efficacy of two specific policy tools to combat ethnic discrimination on the housing market: diversity training and announced correspondence testing. We use quasi-experimental designs with simulated and real behavioural outcomes to measure the causal effects of these policy tools on discrimination. In the final part, we investigate the joint and longitudinal effects of municipality indicators and local anti- discrimination policies to explain the changing local levels of ethnic discrimination over time.