Major active project.
Introduction
Housing markets are where exclusion mechanisms become visible and measurable. Some are prejudice-driven, such as landlords and agents screening by name, photograph, or biographical detail. Some are economically rational at the individual level but produce identical group-level effects, as when incumbents protect a scarce local resource from outsiders. Some operate through the housing supply itself such as planning constraints, greenbelt rules, the gap between elastic in-migration and inelastic stock. My work treats housing as the test ground on which these mechanisms can be measured and compared, and asks how their spatial pattern turns individual-level decisions into population-level inequality. Discrimination is one mechanism of exclusion in this frame, not the frame itself.
A first cluster of work develops a tripartite framework for distinguishing race-based, symbolic-stigma, and foreignness-based screening in housing markets. The framework separates prejudice-driven gatekeeping from rational in-group resource protection — the latter often produces the same observed gap but responds to different policy levers. A meta-analysis of 54 correspondence-test studies across 22 countries shows that the standard “ethnic-minority” discrimination penalty decomposes meaningfully into these three components, and that anti-discrimination interventions (warning letters, sanctions, customer-side norm-shifting) perform differently across them in randomised field-experimental designs.
A second, newer cluster is a three-year UK programme on housing search, supply, and the spatial incidence of remote work. It builds a family of revealed-demand indices from search-listing data; joins demand to supply to produce a spatial-tightness index; validates the demand signal as a leading indicator of realised prices; and then estimates the housing-cost incidence of remote work, which is a regressive cross-group externality in which high-wage teleworkers’ relocation raises housing costs for non-teleworking locals where supply is inelastic. The capstone integrates these elasticities into a quantitative spatial general-equilibrium model with explicit efficiency-versus-equity accounting; housing-supply elasticity is the policy lever connecting the two halves.
The two clusters converge on a common question: how spatial constraints turn individual-level decisions (a landlord’s screening, a teleworker’s relocation) into population-level inequality, using complementary data and methods.
Research Grants
- Mapping and Studying Global Housing Discrimination
- Spatial Governance, Behavioural Interventions and Regional Inequality
Collaboration network
To be added.
Events
To be added.
Publications
- Good jobs, good tenants? Understanding racial and gender discrimination in the housing market
- The gender dimension of homeownership: Evidence from China
- Is hiding my first name enough? Using behavioural interventions to mitigate racial and gender discrimination in the rental housing market
- Housing wealth distribution, inequality and residential satisfaction
Working papers
- Foreignness, Ethnicity, and Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Singapore
- Race, symbolic stigma and foreignness: decomposing the housing-discrimination penalty
- What’s in a Name? Disagreement about Discrimination in Tokyo’s Rental Housing Market