Temporal dynamics of housing market discrimination against migrants from COVID-19 epicenters in Chinese megacities

The SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has had unprecedented social consequences, including presumptions of discrimination against people from specific regions or ethnic groups. A causal link between the course of the pandemic and discrimination is not yet established. We use a correspondence study to estimate whether people from Wuhan, China – the initial hotspot of the pandemic – face housing market discrimination. We also investigate the persistence of the effect over time. More than two thousand email applications were sent in the spring of 2020, some of which were randomly assigned to state that the applicant would come from Wuhan. We replicate parts of the experiment at the end of 2023. Applicants from Wuhan experienced a significant discrimination from landlords in 2020, being 12.5 percentage points less likely to receive a response and 18.3 percentage points less likely to be invited to a showing of apartments compared to a control group. Providing additional information on virus exposure did not substantially alter these outcomes at the beginning of the pandemic. However, when revisiting this “Wuhan discrimination effect” in 2023, we do not find evidence of persistent discrimination. We conclude that discrimination of tenants based on disease is unlikely to affect housing stability or affordability in the long-run.