Estimating the implicit value of a short-term rental license: A case study of Airbnb survivals in New York city

Abstract

Following New York City’s recent regulations requiring hosts of short-term accommodations to obtain licenses, most hosts either exited the market or switched to monthly rentals. This raises the question of the implicit value of a short-term rental license—a topic that has not received much attention in the literature. To address this gap, we estimated several fixed-effect negative-binomial regressions using data on New York’s extant Airbnb listings from February 2023 to March 2024. We found that short-term licensed listings earn, on average, between 5.2 and 7.2 thousand dollars more per year than unlicensed ones.