Tenancy Rent Control and Credible Commitment in Maintenance

Richard Arnott and Elizaveta Shevyakhova

No 661, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Under tenancy rent control, rents are regulated within a tenancy but not between tenancies. This paper investigates the effects of tenancy rent control on housing quality, maintenance, and rehabilitation. Since the discounted revenue received over a fixed-duration tenancy depends only on the starting rent, intuitively the landlord has an incentive to spruce up the unit between tenancies in order to 'show' it well, but little incentive to maintain the unit well during the tenancy. The paper formalizes this intuition, and presents numerical examples illustrating the efficiency loss from this effect.

JEL-codes: R21 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2007-04-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/wp660.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tenancy rent control and credible commitment in maintenance (2014)
Working Paper: Tenancy Rent Control and Credible Commitment in Maintenance (2014)
Working Paper: TENANCY RENT CONTROL AND CREDIBLE COMMITMENT IN MAINTENANCE (2008)
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:boc:bocoec:661

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum (baum@bc.edu).