En avreglerings effekt på hyresnivåerna - Erfarenheter från Finland

Sammanfattning: Rent control is recurrently debated in Sweden. These disputes were one of the major culprits behind the Swedish government crisis in 2021. Many people fear that deregulating the rental housing market would make the rent unaffordable for most tenants. Meanwhile, Sweden's neighboring country Finland deregulated the rental housing market almost 30 years back. Since then, Finland has seen an increased supply of rental housing and the queue time has been reduced to zero, but rents have also increased. This thesis intends to identify and quantify any changes in rent levels as a result of the deregulation in Finland. This is done by using a difference-in-difference analysis with Finland as the treatment group. Sweden is chosen as the control group because of its geographical, cultural and socio-economic similarities with Finland. Our dependent variable is the countries' indexes of their real rent, with 1980 as the base year. The estimates indicate that deregulation led to increased real rents in Finland between 2001 and 2018. The most significant effect was observed during the period from 2013 to 2018, with the estimated treatment effect being 38.63 units. This means that the Finnish real rent index increased by 38.63 units compared to the Swedish index because of the deregulation. On average the real rents in Finland increased by 0,90 percent more per year than the Swedish rents. Our results must be interpreted with caution as additional factors such as economic crises, government subsidies and other policy changes might interfere with the results.