We offer a novel approach to investigate the extent to which the expansion of the sharing economy is responsible for increases in long-term rents and prices on the housing market. Using a panel of quarterly data on newly signed rental contracts and transaction prices in Barcelona from 2015-Q2 to 2018-Q4, we implement a fixed-effects spatial 2SLS method allowing for endogeneity in the variable which measures the presence of Airbnb. We find that a 100-unit increase in the number of Airbnb listings in a given neighborhood induces a 2.1% increase in rents. We find no indication that Airbnb affects transaction prices.
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