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6.2.2 Results <br />We find that 6% decrease in housing supply led to 7% increase in rental prices. These <br />caused an aggregate welfare loss to renters of $5 Billion. This is almost as large as the <br />benefits accrued by the lucky beneficiaries of rent control. These GB welfare losses only <br />account for the increased rents due to the decreased supply of housing. We also found that <br />rent control incentivized landlords to invest in their properties by renovating and building <br />new housing, as well as converting to owner occupancy. These effects likely attached higher <br />income tenants to San Francisco and further raised rents. It appears that the GE losses from <br />the landlords' response to rent control essentially completely undoes the gains accrued to <br />the households that were lucky enough to receive rent control in 1994. <br />7 Conclusion <br />In this paper, we study the welfare impacts of rent control on its tenant beneficiaries as <br />well as the welfare impacts of landlords' responses. To answer this question, we exploit a <br />unique rent control expansion in San Francisco in 1994 that suddenly provided rent control <br />protections for small multifamily housing built prior to 1980. By combining new panel micro <br />data on individual migration decisions with detailed assessor data on individual SF parcels <br />we get quasi -experimental variation in the assignment of rent control at both the individual <br />tenant level and at the parcel level. <br />We find that, on average, in the medium to long term the beneficiaries of rent control <br />are between 10 and 20 percent more likely to remain at their 1994 address relative to the <br />control group. These effects are significantly stronger among older households and among <br />households that have already spent a number of years at their current address. On the other <br />hand, individuals in areas with quickly rising rents and with few years at their 1994 address <br />are less likely to remain at their current address, consistent with the idea that landlords try <br />to remove tenants when the reward is high, through either eviction or negotiated payments. <br />43 <br />