Do rent controls and other tenancy regulations affect new construction? Some answers from long-run historical evidence

Abstract

The (re-)introduction of tenancy regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent controls promise short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This study presents new long-run data on both rent regulation and housing construction for 16 developed countries (1910–2016) and finds that more restrictive rental market legislation generally has a negative impact on both new housing construction and residential investment. This is especially true for strict rent controls and housing rationing measures in the post-1960 period. Tenancy security can on average also dampen construction activity. The negative effect is overall less significant and strong in magnitude than expected and may have been offset by exemptions for new construction, by compensating social housing construction and by a flight of new construction into the owner-occupied sector. Still, on average, rent controls came at the cost of less construction activity.

Private Insurance, Public Welfare, and Financial Markets: Alpine and Maritime Countries in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Abstract

Contemporary capitalist societies use different institutions to manage economic risks. While different public welfare state and financial institutions (banks, capital markets) have been studied across coordinated and liberal market economies, the different worlds of private insurance institutions have been understudied. Building on new insurance data sets (1880–2017), we find that countries with a Maritime (USA, GBR, CAN) in contrast to the more backward Alpine (AUT, DEU, CHE) insurance tradition developed bigger life and nonlife insurance earlier, with less state-associated and reinsurance enterprises, but riskier investments steered toward financial markets. We argue that the larger and more “Maritime” the insurance sector, the more it made welfare states liberal and securities markets large. Insurance is thus a hidden factor for countries’ varieties of capitalism and worlds of welfare. The recent convergence on the Maritime model, however, implies that the riskier and risk-individualizing type of private insurance has added to privatization and securitization trends everywhere.