Temporal dynamics of rent regulations – The case of the German rent control

The importance of administrative data in the evaluation of the incidence of social housing allowance programmes

“…This issue is in line with a new national subsidy financed by means of national Spanish funds, although managed regionally, to benefit young people (Royal Decree, 42/2022, of 18 January, 2022. According to this paper and previous literature (Thomschke, 2016;Mense et al, 2017;Diamond, McQuade, & Qian, 2019;Raya, 2021;Breidenbach, Eilers, & Fries, 2022), this kind of subsidy works better than limiting rental prices. The latter occurred in Catalonia from September 2020 to April 2022, when the Constitutional Court annulled it on the grounds that it infringed on state powers (Sentence of the Constitutional Court 37/2022, of 10 March, 2022).…”

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul? The Redistribution of Wealth Caused by Rent Control

“…However, landlords and tenants have an incentive to negotiate side payments to evade rent controls when rental housing is in short supply, such as charging high rents for furniture or appliances, or tenants offering discounts on services provided to the landlord. Similarly, the enforcement of rent control laws may be lax, as suggested in Breidenbach, Eilers, and Fries (2022). The growth rate of net rents may also be impacted by maintenance costs.…”

Investment incentives of rent controls and gentrification: Evidence from German micro data

“…And last but not least, we contribute to the growing literature focused on the German housing market. The general effectiveness of the German rent control has been the focus of recent analyses (Breidenbach, Eilers et al, 2022;Deschermeier et al, 2016;Kholodilin et al, 2016;Mense et al, 2019Mense et al, , 2023Thomschke, 2019). As the design of rent controls already applied in other countries slightly differs from the German one, the above-mentioned findings might only be partly transferable to the German housing market.…”