The Regulation of Private Tenancies - A Multi-Country Analysis
Author: Jan P. Weber, published: October 2017
There is a tremendous lack of empirical data on rental market regulation. This work closes the gap in economic literature by creating two new datasets. One covers 18 advanced economies over a period of 42 years. The other is about rental market regulation in 66 countries for the year 2010. The work combines law and economics by transforming rent and eviction laws into a numerical index that can be used for economic analyses. The resulting data set answers the increasing demand for more applied research and market knowledge that has extremely increased since the financial market crisis in the past decade. It can be used to tackle more research questions beyond the analysis conducted in this thesis. Furthermore, the determinants of rent and eviction control are analysed by using a time-invariant dataset of 66 countries. The analysis shows that tenure security laws are more in favour of tenants in countries with a French legal origin. Surprisingly, in the past leftist parties in power only had a significantly positive impact on the level of tenure security in more advanced economies As far as rent control is concerned, however, differences within the country sample cannot be explained with legal origin, political power or religion.
The last analytic chapter of this book sheds light on the effects of different rent regimes on real rents for 18 regions and 42 years.
The results show that tenure security has a considerable impact on rents in case of moderate rent control regimes. Thus, second-generation rent control regimes offering time limited tenure security and a mandatory minimum duration period may provoke higher rent appreciations than in free rent regimes. Yet, other moderate rent regimes do not show significant differences to free markets. In turn, very strict rent regimes lead to lower real rent appreciations in relation to free rent regimes. Finally, free rent regimes on average show very stable real rents for the analysed time period. This contradicts the often politically motivated fear that free rent regimes provoke strongly rising rents.
Measuring stick-style housing policies: A multi-country longitudinal database of governmental regulations
Author: Konstantin A. Kholodilin, published March 2018
This paper introduces a new international longitudinal database of governmental housing policies. The regulations are measured using binary variables based on a thorough analysis of the real-time country-specific legislation. Three major restrictive policies are considered: rent control, protection from restriction, and housing rationing. The database covers 64 countries and states between 1910 and 2018. This allows comparisons of regulation stringency across both time and space. The analysis reveals a surge of all restrictive policies in the first half of the 20th century.
However, following World War II, the evolution of policies diverged: while rent control became more flexible or was phased out, tenure security stabilised at a high level or even increased, while housing rationing became used less frequently. An application of dynamic multivariate longitudinal clustering permits dividing the sample in two groups. One cluster comprises countries with more flexible rent control, stronger tenure security, and more housing rationing. It mostly includes European continental countries. Another cluster unifies countries with a more rigid rent control, weaker tenant protection, and rarely used housing rationing.
The emergence of housing regulations on the territory of the former Russian Empire during the Russian Civil war
Author: Konstantin A. Kholodilin
This paper analyzes the governmental regulation of the rental housing market in the states that arose on the ruins of the Russian Empire during the Russian Civil war in 1918–1922. Geographically it covers the territories that were under control of the Province of the the Armed Forces of South Russia, Crimean Regional Government, Don Cossack Host, the Far Eastern Republic, the Provisional government of the Northern region, the Provisional government of Siberia, and Soviet Russia as well as national states, such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. It examines and compares three major tools of the restrictive housing policy: rent control, protection of tenants from eviction, and housing rationing. It shows an emergence, evolution, continuity of the housing legislation of these governments with respect to that of the All-Russian Provisional government and its relationship with the housing policies of Bolsheviks. Despite sometimes radically opposite ideological attitudes, different governments reacted in a similar way to the acute housing shortage by intervening into the housing market. Finally, government regulations of the rental housing market on the territory of the former Russian Empire is put into European context using the regulation intensity indices constructed by the author. In Russia, the governmental regulation of the housing market emerged somewhat later than in Europe in general. However, in Soviet Russia it turned into a permanent regulation and remained in force until the early 1990s, while many European countries already in the early 1920s began to deregulate.