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Agreements must be kept? Residential leases during Covid-19

This paper studies how a Covid-19 lockdown affected residential lease payments. Survey data on 1511 Israeli renter households show nearly one in eight households not paying full rent during the lockdown, with these households holding back, on average, a third of their contractually due rent. Financially fragile households with greater income cuts, and households with leases lacking provisions that effectively provide for damages upon non-payment pay a lower share of contract rent. So do households with more frequent encounters with their landlord, or longer tenure in the apartment. Bargaining and relational contracts theories help explain these results

Lead investigator:

Itai Ater

Affiliation:

Tel Aviv University

Primary topic:

Attitudes, media & governance

Secondary topic:

Families & households

Region of data collection:

Asia and Oceania

Country of data collection

Israel

Status of data collection

Complete

Type of data being collected:

From private company

Unit of real-time data collection

Individual

Start date

4/2020

End date

4/2020

Frequency

One-off

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