Hayek Programme Online Webinar Series
Evaluating Rent Control and Housing Regulations
Konstantin A. Kholodilin (DIW Berlin)
Tuesday 29 October 2024 18:30 - 20:00
Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.
Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.
Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.
About this event
Rent control is a highly debated social policy with a long history that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries worldwide facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? To answer this question, we need to identify the effects of rent control. This presentation will review a large empirical literature investigating the impact of rent controls on various socioeconomic and demographic aspects. Rent control appears to be quite effective in terms of slowing the growth of rents paid for dwellings subject to control. However, this policy also leads to a wide range of adverse effects affecting the whole society. In particular, it reduces the construction, leads to a lower quality of housing, and increases rents paid for uncontrolled dwellings. Moreover, in the longer run, it leads to higher homeownership, thus, undermining the rental sector and reducing the number of tenants who rent control is supposed to protect. Therefore, before embarking on such regulations, the government should carefully weigh all the options. Konstantin A. Kholodilin was born in 1973 in Saint-Petersburg (Russia). He had graduated from the Saint-Petersburg State University in 1995. In 2003, he obtained his doctor title from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and in 2012 a title of Doctor habilitatus from the Europa-Universität Viadrina (Germany). From 2001 till 2004, he was a researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), where he was developing a model to predict the the business cycle turning points in Belgium. Since 2005, he is a senior researcher at the DIW Berlin (Germany). He specializes mainly in the following fields: real-estate economy, spatial econometrics, and time series analysis of the business cycles.
Related
The online webinar series of the LSE Hayek Programme will feature academic scholars or policy experts on a range of interdisciplinary topics that are related in some way to the intellectual contributions of F.A. Hayek.
These include individualism and economic freedom, the nature and future of liberal democracy, social justice and welfare, decision-making under radical uncertainty, macroeconomic management, the rule of law and justice, and others.
All sessions will be conducted on Zoom, lasting 1.5 hours, with a structured format of 45 minutes for speaker presentations followed by a 45-minute Q&A session. Additionally, for those unable to attend live, all webinars will be recorded for later access.
Events in the series will begin in March 2024, usually held one Thursday each month, from 6pm - 7:30pm unless otherwise stated.
For further information please contact Bryan Cheang, by email: b.cheang@lse.ac.uk.