Insuring Landlords -- by Thomas Bézy, Antoine B. Levy, Timothy McQuade

This paper shows that insuring landlords against non-payment risk can improve housing access and upward geographic mobility for fragile tenants. We study Visale, a large-scale publicly funded rent guarantee insurance policy in France, free for eligible tenants and landlords. Using administrative household and claim payout data and quasi-experimental eligibility variation by exact age, we show the guarantee increased access to private-sector rental housing, especially for immigrants, newly formed households, and low-income renters. The scheme eased long-distance mobility toward expensive, high-wage neighborhoods at a moderate fiscal cost per marginal move, though potentially displacing comparable ineligible tenants through higher rents. We thank Minghao Yang and Tai Nguyen for excellent research assistance, and Action Logement officials, notably Jerome Drunat and Milene Houdusse, for providing background and data on the Visale scheme. We thank Boaz Abramson, Adrien Bilal, Eric Chyn (discussant), Rebecca Diamond, Cecile Gaubert, Adam Guren, Jarkko Harju (discussant), Gabriel Kreindler, Enrico Moretti, Mathilde Muñoz, Nick Tsivanidis, Winnie Van Dijk, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Danny Yagan, and Owen Zidar, as well as participants at SITE Housing, SITE Financial Regulation, UC San Diego, Columbia, UC Santa Barbara, the AEA Annual Meetings, ECHOPPE (TSE), UEA meetings, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley Haas, Sciences Po, O-Lab Opportunity Conference, NBER Transatlantic Public Economics, NBER SI Public, NBER SI Urban, SED Barcelona, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Stanford, LSE, and USC Lusk for helpful comments and feedback. This work was supported by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, and access to the CASD secure data center through public grant ANR-17-EURE-001 of the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the “Investissements d’avenir” program. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition toworking papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals—theNBER Reporter, theNBER Digest, theBulletin on Health, theBulletin on the Economics of Alzheimer's, and theBulletin on Entrepreneurship—as well asresearch spotlights, lectures, and panel videos.