Rent control policies seek to ensure affordable and stable housing for current tenants; however, they also increase the incentive for landlords to evict tenants since rents re-set when tenants leave in a vacancy decontrol system. Evictions may reduce both the anti-displacement and rent reduction effects of rent control. We exploit variation across ZIP codes in policy exposure to the 1994 rent control referendum in San Francisco to study the effects of rent control on eviction behavior. We find that a zip code with the average level of treatment experiences an additional 34 eviction notices, an 83% increase, and an additional 13 wrongful eviction claims, a 125% increase. These effects were concentrated in low income ZIP codes and were larger in years when average rent prices rose faster than the allowed rent increases for controlled units.

Policy advocates claim that one benefit of rent control may be decreased intimate partner violence (IPV). However, the theoretical effects of rent control on IPV are ambiguous. Rent control may lessen financial stressors within a relationship and decrease strain that leads to violence. However, it may make leaving the relationship more costly, shifting the bargaining power in the relationship and leading to more violence. We leverage the 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco as a natural experiment to study this question. This expansion created variation across zip codes in the number of rental units that were newly rent controlled. We exploit this variation in a continuous difference-in-difference design. We estimate an elasticity of -0.08 between the number of newly rent controlled units and assaults on women resulting in hospitalization. This effect translates to a nearly 10% decrease in assaults on women for the average zip code. This relationship is not explained by changes in neighborhood composition or overall crime, consistent with the effects being driven by individual level changes in IPV.

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men’s football and men’s basketball programs. We characterize these economic rents using comprehensive revenue and expenses data for college athletic departments between 2006 and 2019, and we estimate rent-sharing elasticities to measure how rents flow to women’s sports and other men’s sports and lead to increased spending on facilities, coaches’ salaries, and other athletic department personnel. We rule out skill-upgrading of coaches as an alternative explanation of our results by focusing on head coach “stayers” using panel data on the identity of each football head coach in our sample. Using complete roster data for every student-athlete playing sports at these colleges in 2018, we find that the rent-sharing effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be Black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be White and come from higher-income neighborhoods. Having documented the existence of rent-sharing, we conclude with stylized calculations of a wage structure for college athletes using the collective bargaining agreements in professional sports leagues as a benchmark. We also discuss how our results help understand how universities have responded to recent threats to these rents arising from litigation, legislation, and the global coronavirus pandemic.