Authors: Sofie R. Waltl, Xuan Liu, Helen X. H. Bao
Year: 2026
Status: Work in Progress
PDF: Available upon request — hxb20@cam.ac.uk
Research line: Exclusion and spatial inequality in housing markets
Abstract
We provide an integrated theoretical and empirical synthesis of the housing-discrimination literature. The two-primitive framework that anchors the generic discrimination literature (taste-based after Becker 1957 and statistical after Phelps 1972 and Arrow 1973) is augmented in housing markets by three theoretical sub-types of each primitive and by four moderators that convert preferences and beliefs into action: attention allocation, law-and-norm signals, market selectivity, and sub-market structure. We organise the empirical evidence on a two-by-two matrix of tenure (rental versus sales) by market side (supply versus demand). Approximately ninety per cent of the published correspondence-test evidence sits in the single cell of demand-side rental discrimination against tenants, leaving the other three cells substantially under-evidenced. We then identify eleven structural features that distinguish housing-market discrimination from the generic literature: spatial sorting, long-duration relationships, multi-party matching, an attention reversal vis-à-vis labour markets, sub-market concentration, regulatory patchwork, intersectionality, a crisis-asymmetric response, a thirty-five-year persistence of subtle forms of discrimination, the Airbnb sub-domain, and within-country formal-versus-informal market contrasts. We close with a research agenda anchored on the three under-evidenced cells of the matrix, on five geographic-temporal coverage maps, and on the longer-horizon vision of a coordinated international research infrastructure.
Keywords: housing discrimination; correspondence test; observational data; sales market; rental market; supply-side discrimination; meta-analysis; identity economics; social closure.