Rent Control and Tenancy Duration

Abstract

This paper investigates how rent control affects mobility on the Danish private rental housing market. Based on a unique and extensive data set a measure of the degree of rent regulation of each housing unit is calculated, and this is coupled with socio-economic characteristics and spells of tenancy duration for each household. To accommodate the special features of such a data set we apply a proportional hazard duration model, that encompasses both the presence of left truncated tenancy durations, right censored observations and allows for a very flexible specification of the time dependency as captured by the baseline hazard function. We find that tenancy mobility is severely reduced by the presence of rent control. Tenancy duration for a typical household in the private rental sector is found to be more than six years longer if the apartment belongs to the 10 per cent most regulated units than if it belongs to the 10 per cent least regulated units.

Keywords: Rent control, mobility, duration model

JEL Classification: C41, R31, D45, L51