Households' willingness to pay for public housing

A-Tier
Journal: Journal of Urban Economics
Year: 2016
Volume: 92
Issue: C
Pages: 91-105

Score contribution per author:

2.011 = (α=2.01 / 2 authors) × 2.0x A-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

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.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:juecon:v:92:y:2016:i:c:p:91-105
Journal Field
Urban
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-29