Natives, immigrants and social cohesion: intra-city analysis combining the hedonic approach and a framed field experiment

The literature on the hedonic price approach applied to housing highlights the existence of natives’ preferences against living in urban areas with high foreign-born population. At the same time, empirical and experimental evidence show that ethnic fragmentation reduces social cohesion in society. Mainly because of the difficulty to measure social cohesion at the neighborhood level, the correlation between these two phenomena is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate natives’ preferences for immigrants following an original approach that combines the hedonic price approach and a framed field experiment. The latter allows us to collect a measure of cooperation at the neighborhood level. We apply this methodology to the city of Milan. Our findings show that natives prefer to not live in dense immigrants neighborhoods. However, this preference is not attributable to an erosion of social cohesion in those areas.