Tenant screening services are increasingly used by landlords, property managers, and rental agencies to assess the potential risk of a tenant. Landlords, property managers, and rental agencies could hire a third-party tenant screening service to run a comprehensive background check on potential tenants, and they provide a tenant screening report with a tenant score, which typically combines a tenant's credit score, criminal history, and eviction history. I aim to empirically examine how the use of tenant screening reports affects the decision-making process on whom to rent to, and whether it mitigates or perpetuates already-existing racial inequality in rental market outcomes. I want to examine whether tenant scores are another form of barrier for Black tenants, and whether rental decision-makers use tenant scores as a justification for their own biases, thus whether using tenant-screening scores have further penalizing effects on Black tenants compared to when no scores are used.
