Mohammed goes house-hunting: an experimental study of discrimination

We conduct a field experiment in order to investigate discrimination against Muslims in the UK rental market. We find that Muslims are significantly less likely to receive a viewing, an extremely robust result that persists across genders, cities and landlord and property types. Further, there is evidence that even those landlords who do not formally discriminate are nonetheless less polite to Muslim applicants. Neither of the leading theories appear well suited to explain the discrimination observed in this study. On the one hand, discrimination completely disappears once we restrict attention to Muslim landlords, a fact that is difficult to reconcile with statistical models of discrimination. On the other hand, discrimination does not increase with interaction, in apparent contradiction of Becker’s ‘taste based’ model. We argue that a re-interpretation of the Becker model can explain our findings.