Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk.

Abstract:   Cities worldwide have regulated the peer-to-peer short-term rental market claiming that those markets remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an increase in rents. However, at the time many of these policies were passed, empirical evidence for or against this causal claim was scarce. We investigate two policy changes in Berlin to first assess how effective they were in regulating Airbnb, the largest online peer-to-peer short-term rental platform. In a second step, we then use this policy-induced change in Airbnb supply to assess the impact of Airbnb on rents in the city. We find that the presence of Airbnb listings indeed increases average rents. This effect is particularly strong for entire homes listed on Airbnb as compared to private or shared rooms. Furthermore, Airbnb listings that are available for rent for a larger part of the year have a larger impact on rents. Heterogeneity analyses suggest some effect heterogeneity across the city. In particular, areas with lower Airbnb density tend to be affected more by additional Airbnb listings.

(joint with Tomaso Duso, Claus Michelsen, and Maximilian Schäfer)