Field Experiment Tests for Discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. Rental Housing Market

2013/08/20 by Andrew Hanson, Michael Santas · 91 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Business #Demographic economics #Economics #Ethnic group #Immigration #Law #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research #Political science #Psychology #Rental housing #Renting #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

paper · doi:10.4284/0038-4038-2012.231

published in Southern Economic Journal 81(1), 135-167 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2013/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

This article tests for discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. rental housing market using e‐mail correspondence with landlords advertising units online. We divide Hispanics into two groups: those that appear assimilated into American culture and recent immigrants. We find little difference in the treatment of assimilated Hispanics and whites; however, Hispanics we portray as recent immigrants receive less favorable treatment with margins of net discrimination as large as 6.89% of landlords. We also find discrimination varies significantly at the region level and by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods.

Citations

• Rental Discrimination and Ethnicity in Names1
• Housing Discrimination in Metropolitan America: Explaining Changes between 1989 and 2000

Cited by

• The Silicon Ceiling: Auditing GPT’s Race and Gender Biases in Hiring
• Housing discrimination in the low-income context: Evidence from a correspondence experiment
• Ethnic and gender discrimination in the rental housing market: Evidence from a meta-analysis of correspondence tests, 2006–2017
• Age and hiring for high school graduate Hispanics in the United States
• The impact of renter protection policies on rental housing discrimination
• The economic disparity between Hispanic and non‐Hispanic White households: An analysis of middle‐class achievement
• The Significance of Name-Based Racial Composition in Analyzing Neighborhood Disparities

Related

• Housing Discrimination in Metropolitan America: Explaining Changes between 1989 and 2000
• Rental Market Discrimination Against Same-Sex Couples: Evidence From a Pairwise-Matched Email Correspondence Test
• Immigrant Characteristics and Hispanic-Anglo Housing Inequality
• Do Field Experiments on Labor and Housing Markets Overstate Discrimination? A Re-examination of the Evidence
• The impact of renter protection policies on rental housing discrimination