The Hidden Cost of Smoking: Rent Premia in the Housing Market
Cigdem Gedikli,
Robert Hill (robert.hill@uni-graz.at),
Oleksandr Talavera (oleksandr.talavera@gmail.com) and
Okan Yilmaz (okan.yilmaz@swansea.ac.uk)
Additional contact information
Cigdem Gedikli: Swansea University
Okan Yilmaz: Swansea University
Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham
Abstract:
In this paper, we provide novel evidence on the additional costs associated with smoking. While it may not be surprising that smokers pay a rent premium, we are the first to quantify the size of this premium. Our approach is innovative in that we use text mining methods that extract implicit information on landlords' attitudes to smoking directly from Zoopla UK rental listings. Applying hedonic, matching and machine-learning methods to the text-mined data, we find a positive smoking rent premium of around 6 percent. This translates into 14.40GBP of indirect costs, in addition to 40GBP of weekly spending on cigarettes estimated for an average smoker in the UK.
Keywords: Smoking; Rental market; Hedonic regression; Matching; Text mining; Random forest; Smoking rent premium; Contracting frictions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 R21 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.cal.bham.ac.uk/pdf/22-06.pdf
Related works:
Journal Article: The hidden cost of smoking: Rent premia in the housing market (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:22-06
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oleksandr Talavera (o.talavera@bham.ac.uk).