Ethnic Penalties in the German Rental Housing Market
Authors: Tobias Roth, Klaus Pforr, Natalie Backes
Cooperation partner: Andreas Horr
Project description
While field experiments have repeatedly shown that certain ethnic groups are discriminated against by landlords when looking for accommodation, little is known about ethnic inequalities in relation to rent prices. Moreover, in the few previous studies on ethnic rent differences, it has not been possible to adequately control for the location of the apartment, although this is a key factor for the rent level.A second key shortcoming of most previous studies is that, due to small sample sizes, they are unable to differentiate between migrant groups that are more or less likely to be disadvantaged on the German rental market.Our aim is therefore to control as precisely as possible for the small-scale residential location in addition to the characteristics of the households, the apartment and the residential building. At the same time, we want to use representative data to distinguish between different ethnic groups that are likely to be affected by discrimination to varying degrees. For our analysis, we use data from the Scientific Use Files of the 2018 microcensus, which contain an additional program on the housing situation.The microcensus is characterized by its representativeness and its high case numbers, which enable a differentiated measurement of ethnicity. It is also a cluster sample in which the selected units are made up of the sampling districts. These districts consist of several neighboring houses or, in the case of larger buildings, all or some of the apartments in the building. By controlling for the sampling districts in fixed-effects models, where households are compared within a sampling district, it is possible in our analysis to (almost) perfectly control for the location of the apartment or house. For larger buildings, this approach also allows us to control for all building characteristics.