Open house? Not for everyone: Discrimination patterns in rental markets

We conduct a correspondence study with 590 landlords across Austria and Germany to examine ethnic and religious discrimination in apartment rental markets. Examining how discrimination varies by landlord type, location, and apartment price, we find that applicants with Muslim minority names are 18% less likely to receive a positive response than applicants with Christian majority names. This result is mainly driven by private landlords, who discriminate at a much higher rate. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation is constrained by the fact that individual landlords often retain final decision-making authority. Finally, we use granular district-level data for Vienna to investigate how the interaction of price and location influences discrimination. We find that discrimination is largely absent for expensive apartments in central districts, but substantially higher for below-average-priced apartments in these areas. This pattern suggests that discrimination against Muslim-named applicants is particularly strong for affordable apartments in desirable neighborhoods, which may help explain the finding that migrants across the EU pay disproportionately more on rent than natives.