Are lesbians discriminated against in the rental housing market? Evidence from a correspondence testing experiment

This paper presents a field experiment, conducted over the Internet, studying possible discrimination against lesbians in the rental housing market in Sweden. We let two fictitious couples, one heterosexual and one lesbian, apply for vacant rental apartments advertised by landlords on the Internet. We then investigated whether there were differences between the couples in the number of received call-backs, invitations to further contact, and invitations to immediate showings. Our findings show no indication of differential treatment of lesbians by landlords. A discussion relating to earlier findings is provided. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.