Measuring the Stick-Style Housing Policies : A Multi-Country Longitudinal Database of Governmental Regulations

This paper introduces a new international longitudinal database of governmental housing policies. The regulations are measured using binary variables based on a thorough analysis of the real-time country-specific legislation. Three major restrictive policies are considered: rent control, protection from restriction, and housing rationing. The database covers about 50 countries between 1910 and 2018. This allows comparisons of the regulation stringency both across time and space. The analysis reveals a surge of all restrictive policies in the first half of the 20th century. However, after World War II, these policies evolved along divergent paths: while rent control became more flexible or was phased out, tenure security stabilized at a high level or even increased, and housing rationing became less used. An application of dynamic multivariate longitudinal clustering permits dividing the sample in two groups. One cluster comprises countries with more flexible rent control, stronger tenure security, and more housing rationing. It includes mostly European continental countries. Another cluster unifies countries with a more rigid rent control, weaker tenant protection, and rarely used housing rationing