Lecture：Is Home Sharing Disrupting Rental or Homeowners’ Market? Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Airbnb

Speaker：Karen Xie(University of Denver)

Time：10:00 a.m.,30th June,2018

Venue: Room 1922, Tongji Building A

Abstract:

We study the impact of home sharing on housing markets. Using a unique data set of Airbnb listings from ten major metropolitan areas in the U.S., we leverage a “natural experiment”—a platform regulation that caps the number of properties a host can manage in a local Airbnb market—to estimate the impact. We find that the restriction was associated with a 3.5% decrease in local rental prices and a 1.9% decrease in housing value. The decrease can be attributed to the removal of absentee landlords’ and homeowners’ properties from Airbnb back to local markets. Furthermore, the price-to-rent ratio increased by about 1.6%, which suggests that online home sharing is mainly a substitute for local rental markets. The findings speak to the questions whether and how home sharing makes housing less affordable.

Bio:

Karen Xie is an Assistant Professor of Hospitality Analytics at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver. Her research focuses on the use of technology and data analytics to solve problems in the service industry. Specialty areas include the digital transformation in the service industry and platform-based markets. Her work relies primarily on econometrics and machine learning using large-scale business data.

Karen’s interdisciplinary work has published at hospitality and information systems journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems. Her applied research has been recognized by many awards, including the prestigious W. Bradford Wiley Memorial Research Award (2017), Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) Research Opportunities, and the Best Paper Award (finalist) from the China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM) (2016). Her work has also received multiple research grants such as the General Research Fund from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. She is an active reviewer for Management Science and Information Systems Research.

Prior to pursuing her academic career, Karen worked as an analyst at the strategy consulting group of Accenture, Inc. During her tenure at University of Denver, she has been an analytics researcher/consultant for industry leaders, including Expedia, UBS, Unilever, Denver City Council, and Mars, Incorporated. She holds a Ph.D. from Temple University Fox School of Business, an M.Phil from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and a Bachelor of Management from Fudan University.