A Review of Empirical Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Rent Control

Abstract

Summary We survey selected literature on costs and benefits of rent controls, with a particular emphasis on empirical literature. Much of the empirical literature focuses on measuring welfare changes to individual households from regulatory regimes. The majority of such studies are based on North American data; some, but surprisingly few, studies have been carried out in Europe. Empirical innovations include treatment of selection bias, estimation of Hicksian rather than Marshallian welfare measures, and analysis of the effects of controls on related uncontrolled markets. Other empirical studies examine effects of controls on mobility; few studies address potentially important supply effects directly. Cost-benefit results, notably transfer efficiency, vary somewhat with empirical technique but even more so by location, reflecting differences in market conditions and type of rent control regime. Recent theoretical models of the effects of rent control based on imperfect information have yet to be thoroughly tested.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 88 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.