Adam Smith Business School

Professor Jos van Ommeren, Vrije University Amsterdam

"Identifying Housing Preferences in Regulated Markets: Evidence from Waiting Lists"
Wednesday, 20 September. 3 pm
Room 355, Main Building

Abstract

In many markets, goods are not allocated based on prices. A prominent example is public housing that is typically allocated based on waiting times. Using a dynamic framework, we show that these waiting times are informative on household preferences regarding the quality of public housing. We apply this framework to estimate the internal and external effects of a large-scale Dutch policy to improve public housing. By estimating unconditional quantile regressions, we show that public housing tenants have a strong preference to reside in newly-built housing units and positively value new public housing units nearby. In addition, we find that owner-occupying residents only weakly value nearby newly-built public housing. These results emphasize that the welfare benefits of investments in public housing quality are likely to be strongly underestimated if effects on the regulated public housing sector are not taken into account.

Bio

Jos van Ommeren (1966) is a Professor of Urban Economics at the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He studied Econometrics at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom and received his PhD in Economics at the VU University Amsterdam. His main interests are in the economic analysis of urban issues, particularly those related to the housing market, and urban policies such as place-based policies, as well as economic analysis of transport policies involving car taxation, infrastructure improvements and parking.

Jos has also worked at the Dutch Central Bank, the European University Institute in Italy, University College London and Cranfield University in the UK, the Frisch Centre in Norway and the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. He is a fellow of the Tinbergen Institute.

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First published: 17 August 2023