Discrimination in the housing market may create large economic inefficiencies and unfair individual outcomes, but is very difficult to measure. To circumvent the problems with unobserved heterogeneity, most recent studies use the correspondence testing approach (i.e. sending fictitious inquiries to landlords). In this study, we generalize the existing methodology in order to facilitate a test of to what extent the measured degree of discrimination depends on applicant, landlord/apartment, and regional characteristics. To show how this more general methodology can be implemented, we investigate the effects of gender, ethnicity, age, and employment status in the Swedish rental market for apartments. Our results confirm the existence of widespread discrimination against some of the groups, but also show that the degree of discrimination varies substantially with landlord, apartment, and regional characteristics. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of using a broad approach when conducting correspondence studies. Our results also allow us to interpret the nature of discrimination and how it relates to segregation and geographical sorting.
This paper extends the VECM cointegration model and PT (permanent-transitory) variance decomposition framework proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson [Lettau, M., Ludvigson, S.C., 2004. Understanding trend and cycle in asset values: reevaluating the wealth effect on consumption. American Economic Review 94 (1), 276-299.] and applies them to Swedish data from 1980q1 to 2004q4. There is strong statistical evidence that the long run movements of aggregate consumption, disposable income, housing wealth, and financial wealth are tied together. However, the evidence also suggests that short run variations in the Swedish housing market are largely dissociated with consumer spending. Meanwhile, it is shown that the strength of the linkage between consumption and housing wealth is not sensitive to different model specifications and various measures of key variables.
This study investigated whether an imposed dwelling size constraint in the Swedish housing allowance system induced recipients to move into smaller apartments and overcrowded conditions, i.e., an unintended consequence of a housing policy shift. To address this matter, this paper exploits a quasi-experimental dimension of the imposed dwelling size limit by applying the difference-in-difference estimator. Data for this study were extracted from the Swedish National Insurance Board’s database on housing allowance recipients, which comprises data previously unavailable for research. The estimation results suggest that this policy shift induced single-parent households living in rental housing to decrease their consumption of interior space, yielding a statistically significant increase in moves into overcrowded conditions, an effect that is even greater for single parents with one child than for those with two or more children. This effect runs directly counter to two long-term stated goals of the Swedish housing allowance system: (1) to induce households to move into better housing, thereby increasing their housing consumption, and (2) to prevent families with children from living in overcrowded conditions.