Conference Agenda

This paper examines the longer-run effects of rent control using a rich micro dataset of German apartment rents and purchase prices. Our empirical analysis exploits the introduction and subsequent abolition of a stringent rent cap and expropriation threats for large real estate companies in Berlin. While we find a drop in rents in the regulated segment and an increase in the unregulated segment while the regulation was in place, our results indicate a sustained increase in rents across both segments following the abolition of the rent cap. We attribute this to a supply side response to the increase in uncertainty on the local real estate market.

We examine the incidence of property taxation in urban rental markets in Spain using novel administrative microdata that link taxpayers to their real estate holdings. Leveraging cross-municipality variation in property tax parameters, we estimate the pass-through to rents and the effect on vacant rental supply. Our results show that landlords raise rents by approximately €0.85 for every €1.00 increase in their property tax liability. This effect is concentrated in long-term residential leases and is amplified at contract renewal, where stricter rent-control provisions limit rent updating in ongoing contracts. Pass-through is also disproportionately higher among small-scale and low-educated landlords. In addition, we find that property tax hikes lead to a modest increase in the supply of vacant units, but only in the commercial segment. These findings underscore the role of property taxation in shaping housing affordability.

In many countries commercial property taxes are an important source of local revenue, yet little is known about their real effects on firms. Using Finnish administrative microdata that allow exact measurement of firm-level property tax payments, we exploit more than 1,000 municipal tax rate changes in an event study design to estimate the real effects of property taxation. Firm-level property tax payments respond nearly one-for-one to statutory rate changes, while the underlying tax base is relatively inelastic. We find that higher property taxes reduce total capital stock by lowering building investment. In contrast, firm scale measures show limited average responses, and entry effects are modest. These results suggest that commercial property taxes are revenue-efficient but distort firms’ capital composition.

Our study investigates public opinion on the housing affordability crisis in Portugal through a nationally representative survey combined with an information provision experiment. Participants were asked to identify perceived causes of rising housing prices, assess their factual knowledge of the housing market and sociodemographic trends, and indicate their preferred policy solutions, carefully framed to reflect trade-offs. Half of the respondents were randomly assigned to receive official statistical information on these trends before indicating their policy preferences. The findings reveal significant heterogeneity in beliefs about the causes of the crisis, pervasive misperceptions regarding market trends, and a limited impact of information provision on policy preferences. These results underscore the challenges of addressing housing policy through informational interventions alone and highlight the need for strategies that integrate behavioral and contextual factors to foster informed public engagement.