Discrimination against people with mental, physical or visual disabilities in the French rental housing market: field experiment

Alexandre Flage and Julie Le Gallo

Housing Studies, 2025, vol. 40, issue 1, 116-138

Abstract: We implement correspondence testing to detect and assess the extent of discrimination against people with disabilities in the French rental housing market. By sending 1,750 emails in a matched-pair procedure, we provide evidence of significant and extensive discrimination against blind people with a guide dog, individuals with mental disabilities, and individuals with motor impairments in the process of rented housing allocation. However, the primary cause of discrimination against blind individuals appears to stem from the presence of the guide dog, rather than the disability itself. Our results are also consistent with the presence of statistical discrimination (particularly based on financial means). We find that absolute discrimination against disabled applicants increases in accordance with the level of rent, while real estate agents discriminate significantly less against disabled applicants than private landlords.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02673037.2023.2266412 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:40:y:2025:i:1:p:116-138

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/chos20

DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2023.2266412

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Studies is currently edited by Chris Leishman, Moira Munro, Ray Forrest, Alex Schwartz, Hal Pawson and John Flint

More articles in Housing Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().