I appear on Ryan Bourne’s excellent new podcast, The Economics of It. We discuss The Economics of Rent Controls drawing on my essay, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. It’s a very good discussion. Here’s one bit (edited slightly to remove some ums for reading and to fix a date I got wrong from memory):

RB: And in your essay you talk about some like truly insane ways that people are trying to signal to landlords that they’ll be good tenants in Oslo. I know you talk about that example.

Tabarrok: Yeah, so in Oslo they had rent controls for many years, but then they got rid of them in 1982 (fixed, AT), And there’s a great paper by Are Oust who looks at what happened. When the rent controls were in place, amazingly he found just like Friedman and Stigler found in San Francisco in 1906 that in Oslo the renters advertised I need an apartment, okay? Won’t you rent me an apartment? And as part of their advertisement they would say I’m willing to look after your cat, I’m willing to, you know, shovel the snow.

And on the other side the landlords would say, well, I’m looking for a good Christian. Uh you know, I’m looking for a uh a heterosexual, you know, single-family couple, whatever—these kinds of things. Sometimes literally advertised, sometimes this would happen, under the table. Um there would be things like you would have to pay uh months–sometimes years–you have to pay your rent years in advance. You know, all kinds of ways in which because of the shortage of apartments, it was the renters who had to advertise…

Even companies would say I’ve got a great employee. Please won’t you get them an apartment for me? Okay. 1982 the rent controls were lifted and suddenly the advertisements switch 100%.  So suddenly it’s no longer the renters who are advertising. It’s now the landlords I’ve got a  great apartment. And uh all of this stuff, are you willing to shovel the driveway, take care of my cat? It all goes away.

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