Rent Control in New Jersey: History and Evidence

TU students and faculty are invited to join The Department of Economics at The University of Tulsa for the presentation of: Rent Control in New Jersey: History and Evidence by Dr. Osman Keshawarz.

Dr. Keshawarz’s research presents empirical analysis of rent control using a framework for thinking on urban land rents that draws on classical political economy, radical geography, and urban sociology. Opposition to rent control has been primarily on theoretical grounds based on neoclassical assumptions regarding the effects of price controls, though the results of the few extant empirical studies have been decidedly mixed.

Using an author-constructed database of New Jersey municipal rent control ordinances in 112 towns in combination with data on rents and households from the American Community Survey , Dr. Keshawarz estimates of the effects of rent control on the growth of rents and the rental housing stock in rent controlled vs. uncontrolled towns using a first-difference approach.

This first-difference estimation strategy examines the impact of rent control on median gross rents, the rental housing stock, and the total housing stock. To isolate cases where rent controls are binding, geographic matching algorithm are employed to identify rent-controlled towns bordering top-quartile and top-half rent growth towns and examine the differential growth in rents and the stock of rental housing.