Does Juan Carlos or Nelson Obtain a Larger Price Cut in the Spanish Housing Market?

Abstract

Using a unique dataset and a nonparametric decomposition, we determine whether immigrants with native names, immigrants with foreign names, and natives have different outcomes in Spain’s housing market. Results suggest that immigrants with native names achieve greater discounts relative to immigrants with non-Spanish names. As a robustness check, we prove that this is not due to the country of birth. We observe that most of the difference in price across immigrant groups remains unexplained, which may imply some form of discrimination (pure or statistical) against immigrants with non-native names.