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While the focus of this paper is an empirical study of the impact of mobile home rent control policies on coach prices, there are two potential global influences on the market environment during the twenty-year period under study. The first is the U.S. Supreme Court's key decision in the case of Yee v. City of Escondido, upholding the constitutionality of mobile home rent control in April of 1992. This decision is significant for this study as it has had the effect of legitimizing rent control policies which hitherto had been undergoing attack from opponents including mobile home park operators and market -oriented policy makers. The second is the economic recession and subsequent recovery in California between 1990 and 1996. The California recession began in 1990:4 and ended in 1994:1. California housing prices halted several years of positive annual increases in 1991:2 but, beginning in 1992:1, posted fifteen consecutive quarters of nominal decreases. Rapidly rising housing and land prices in California explain rising pad rents in many of the state's mobile home parks. As a consequence, renters in many jurisdictions responded by launching efforts to have rent controls enacted into law. Currently, 97 California cities and eight counties have some sort of mobile home rent control. Empirical Studies In a series of papers published since the late 1980s, Professor Werner Hirsch and his colleagues examined the impacts of rent controls on mobile homes in California. Their analysis rests on the insight that ownership of mobile home living space is divided between the owner of the coach and the owner of the land, which is then leased to coach owners. Labels notwithstanding, mobile homes are typically not mobile. Therefore, a coach atop a rent -controlled pad can be expected to sell at a premium. Hirsch et al's studies contain estimates of these values. Basing their analysis on a relatively small sample of observed transactions from the mid-1980s, they estimated that sales prices were boosted by 32 percent because of rent controls, other things equal. A more recent analysis by Hirsch and Rufolo (1999) focused on a single mobile home park in Oceanside, California. A hedonic regression based on a sample of 90 mobile home sales over the period 1986-1992 found that, other things equal, rent controls explain a price premium of eight percent.