landlord discrimination against homosexuals

Ali Ahmed and Mats Hammarstedt (Växjö University, Sweden) conduct a straight-forward, but interesting field experiment in which they test for housing market discrimination against homosexuals. The paper appears in a recent version of Economica. The abstract:

This paper presents the first field experiment studying discrimination against homosexuals on the housing market. The study is conducted on the rental housing market in Sweden using the internet as a research platform. Two fictitious couples, one heterosexual and one male homosexual, apply for vacant rental apartments advertised by landlords on the internet. Our findings show that homosexual males are discriminated against on the Swedish housing market, since the homosexual couple gets far fewer call-backs and fewer invitations to further contacts and to showings of apartments than the heterosexual couple.