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Households' willingness to pay for public housing

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  • Van Ommeren, Jos N.
  • Van der Vlist, Arno J.

Abstract

In the presence of price controls, nonmarket housing allocation mechanisms such as queueing prevent households from revealing their marginal willingness to pay for housing through market prices. We derive the households’ marginal willingness to pay using the intuitive idea that the length of the queue for a specific house reflects the households’ willingness to pay for housing characteristics. We apply our methodology to public housing in the Amsterdam Metropolitan area and show that, on average, the households’ marginal willingness to pay for a unit of public housing is close to its marginal costs. This suggests that the welfare loss of public housing through distortions in housing supply is rather limited and is mainly through distortions in housing demand. We provide indirect evidence of the latter by showing that queueing induces inefficient matching of households and housing.

Suggested Citation

  • Van Ommeren, Jos N. & Van der Vlist, Arno J., 2016. "Households' willingness to pay for public housing," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 91-105.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:juecon:v:92:y:2016:i:c:p:91-105
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2015.11.007
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    Cited by:

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    2. Nick Arnosti & Peng Shi, 2020. "Design of Lotteries and Wait-Lists for Affordable Housing Allocation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(6), pages 2291-2307, June.
    3. Mark A. C. Kattenberg & Wolter H. J. Hassink, 2017. "Who Moves Out of Social Housing? The Effect of Rent Control on Housing Tenure Choice," De Economist, Springer, vol. 165(1), pages 43-66, March.
    4. Hans R. A. Koster & Jos van Ommeren, 2019. "Place-Based Policies and the Housing Market," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 101(3), pages 400-414, July.
    5. Eerola, Essi & Saarimaa, Tuukka, 2018. "Delivering affordable housing and neighborhood quality: A comparison of place- and tenant-based programs," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 44-54.
    6. Wilhelmsson, Mats, 2021. "Demand for rent-regulated apartments:The case of Sweden," Working Paper Series 21/4, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Nonmarket allocation; Public housing; Marginal willingness to pay; Queueing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand

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