Public Housing and the Value of Apartment Quality to Households

The application of hedonic price approaches to obtain estimates of the households' value of apartment characteristics is invalid for regulated housing markets such as public housing. We introduce and apply an alternative method that allows us to estimate renters' marginal willingness to pay for apartment characteristics based on residential mobility. We focus on the households' marginal willingness to pay for quality of apartments. We find that, on average, households place a monetary value on quality which is close to the non-profit housing associations' costs of providing quality.