Abstract

A growing literature analyses historic house prices and rents enabling a better understanding of long-term trends and the impact of historic events on the housing and rental market. This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917 covering an eventful period of Russian and world history: the Russian-Japanese War, the First World War, and the February and October Revolution. Additionally, St. Petersburg was among the first cities introducing a rent control policy in 1915. We collected and digitalised over 5,000 newspaper advertisements for rental units. The exact addresses were geo-coded, which – together with geo-data on the historic road and bridge network and detailed structural characteristics of the rental units – is used to construct a time-continuous, quality-adjusted, hedonic rent price index making use of spatial smoothing techniques. We contribute to the literature by providing the first pre-war and pre-Soviet information on any Russian housing market. We study the effects of several historic events and in depth analyse the implications of the rental policy. We find significant price effects relying on event study methodology. We also find large quantity effects in-line with the predictions of standard stock-flow models for housing.