Charles Xu

An Empirical Analysis On Airbnb influences in U.S. South Side Region

This is the datathon team project for Citadel Data Open Summer Invitational 2021. Inspired by the ongoing debate around house-sharing platforms like Airbnb and their influence on the housing market, we conducted a two-stage least squares regression analysis as an effort to establish causality between the number of Airbnb listings and the median housing price in four major US southern cities (including Asheville, Austin, Nashville, and New Orleans), and Los Angeles. Our results suggest that while Airbnb does expand the short-term rental market by giving hosts the power to flexibly rent out their homes across the year, it might do so through prompting some homeowners in the long-term rental market to switch to short-term home sharing, thus draining long-term supply in local housing market and pushing up the median house price in the coming years.