Alternative Models of Rent Control

Rent Control

Coordination , Rent - Seeking and Control ∗

Two agents want to coordinate their decisions but may also try to extract rents from each other. Decsions are negotiated at the interim stage, when the agents have private information. The agent who owns an asset has the right to make a unilateral decision regarding this asset, so negotiations must satisfy a participation constraint. We compare nonintegration, where each agent owns one asset, w...

Alternative Models of Command and Control

In Chapter One, we described some of the current dominant theories of command and control: control theory, organization charts, and cognitive science. In this appendix, we provide brief descriptions of other cybernetic-related or cognitive-science-related theories, discuss deviations from these dominant paradigms, and relate the cybernetic paradigm to technology development. The fundamental nee...

The Economics and Law of Rent Control

We consider a rent control regime where rent increases on, and eviction of, a sitting tenant are not allowed. However when an apartment becomes vacant the landlord is free to negotiate a new rent. We argue that this stylized system is a good (though polar) approximation for many rent control regimes existent today in several U.S. cities and the world over. Under such a regime, if inflation exis...

The Taylor Rule with an Alternative Housing Rent Index

The rent of shelter accounts for approximately a third of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using a new housing rent index (RRI) developed by Ambrose, Coulson, and Yoshida (2014), we modify the CPI and compute the Taylor rule for the period from 2000 to 2010. With this timely rent index, Taylor rule becomes more consistent with the Federal funds rate than the conventional calculations. However, t...