Rent Pricing Behaviors and Eviction
Seongjin Park, Finance PhD student
Eviction is a critical economic incident by which a million US households are affected each year. Using the landlord's rent pricing behaviors reflected in asking-rent stickiness, the proposed research will study eviction driven by the landlord's economic incentives. The preliminary analysis explores a unique property-level daily asking-rent data obtained from a leading apartment locator service in Chicago and shows that the ex-ante rent stickiness is strongly correlated with rent adjustment after the COVID-19 pandemic. Building fixed effects exploited in the analysis imply that the landlord's rent pricing behaviors and their implications on rent growth are not entirely driven by property characteristics. The preliminary results thus suggest that the landlord's rent pricing behaviors have the potential to explain crucial eviction patterns.