Housing allowance and rents: Evidence from a stepwise subsidy scheme

Essi Eerola and Teemu Lyytikäinen

No 88, Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of housing allowance on rents using discontinuities in the Finnish housing allowance system as a quasi-experimental setting. The stepwise dependence of housing allowance on the floor area of the dwelling and the year of construction of the building allows us to isolate the impact of the generosity of housing allowance from other determinants of rents. The discontinuities in the amount of housing allowances at the studied cut-offs are economically and statistically significant. However, our results show that there are no discontinuities in rents of the recipient households at these cut-offs. Instead, differences in the amount of the housing allowance are translated roughly one-to-one into differences in the rent net of housing allowance.

Keywords: housing benefit; rent; Social security; taxation and inequality; H22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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 (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/148925

Related works:
Journal Article: Housing Allowance and Rents: Evidence from a Stepwise Subsidy Scheme (2021)
Working Paper: Housing Allowance and Rents: Evidence from a Stepwise Subsidy Scheme (2017)
Working Paper: Housing allowance and rents: evidence from a Stepwise Subsidy Scheme (2017)
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:fer:wpaper:88

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anita Niskanen ().