The Neighbor is King: Customer Discrimination in the Housing Market

This paper provides a way to detect customer-based discrimination in the housing market using survey data. We build a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of housing units they own within the same neighborhood. In the event of customers’ prejudice against the minority group, landlords who own several apartments discriminate more often than single-dwelling landlords because they internalize a higher negative externality on their probability to fill their other vacancies. Using the French National Housing Survey, we show that tenants with non-European origin are less likely to rent from a multiple-dwelling landlord than other tenants. We then show that the proportion of multiple-dwelling landlords at the local level is positively correlated with the probability of non-Europeans to be living in public housing while this is not the case of other ethnic groups.