Abstract:
This paper estimates the impact of the murder of film maker Theo vanGogh on November 2, 2004, on listed house prices in Amsterdam with aunique dataset. We use an hedonic-market approach to show that gen-eral attitudes towards Muslim minorities were negatively affected by themurder. Specifically, we test for an effect on listed house prices in neigh-borhoods where more than 25% of the people belong to an ethnic minor-ity from a Muslim country (type I). Relative to the other neighborhoods,house prices in type I neighborhoods decreased in 10 months by about av-erage 3%, with a widening gap over time. The results are robust to severaladjustments including changes in the control group. There is no signifi-cant difference in the time it takes for houses to be sold in type I versusother neighborhoods. Finally, people belonging to the Muslim minoritywere more likely to buy and less likely to sell a house in a type I neighbor-hood after the murder than before.
