How discriminatory is the housing market in Slovakia: experimental investigation.
Author: | Bc. Kristína Sacherová |
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Year: | 2016 - summer |
Leaders: | Mgr. Barbara Pertold-Gebicka M.A., Ph.D. |
Consultants: | |
Work type: | Bachelors |
Language: | English |
Pages: | 68 |
Awards and prizes: | |
Link: | https://is.cuni.cz/webapps/zzp/detail/164979/ |
Abstract: | Housing discrimination is a widespread, but markedly underrated issue that is associated with diverse treatment of applicants for real estate’s sale or rent based on their affiliation to some minority in society. Although there have been many experiments and studies conducted to uncover and measure the presence of discrimination mostly for African Americans in the US and Arabs in several European countries, such extensive researches for the Europe´s largest ethnic minority, Roma, are lacking. This thesis presents an Internet field experiment on discrimination of Roma in the Slovak housing market which uses matched-pair method and four fictitious male applicants to request for a flat or house showing based on an online advert. In total, 396 requests were sent from email addresses with specific names signalizing ethnicity of applicants and the response rate was examined. Data shows that the applicants with Roma-sounding email addresses are 8 to 9.5% less likely to get an invitation for a showing compared to the applicants with the Slovak sounding email addresses. My analysis also suggests that the highest level of discrimination is found in the districts with median Roma contribution (specifically from 3 to 11%). Considering all my findings, it can be eventually concluded that in the Slovak housing market the discrimination of Roma minority as well as the discrimination of the second applicant are present. |