'Does Juan Carlos or Nelson get a larger discount? Discrimination in Spanish housing' (Nov 2018)
- Does Juan Carlos or Nelson Obtain a Larger Price Cut in the Spanish Housing Market?
- By Josep Maria Raya, Catia Nicodemo and Daniel McMillen. Published online on the Urban Affairs Review on 18 November 2018
- Abstract:
- Using a unique dataset and a nonparametric decomposition, we determine whether immigrants with native names, immigrants with foreign names, and natives have different outcomes in Spain’s housing market.
- Results suggest that immigrants with native names achieve greater discounts relative to immigrants with non-Spanish names. As a robustness check, we prove that this is not due to the country of birth.
- We observe that most of the difference in price across immigrant groups remains unexplained, which may imply some form of discrimination (pure or statistical) against immigrants with non-native names.
- Keywords: Spain, discrimination, migration
Discrimination in accessing rental and property housing markets seems to be quite a widespread phenomenon. As researching it to get data can be quite labour intensive, journalists can take advantage of academic work already done on this subject.