Measuring the Effectiveness of the Austrian Anti-Eviction Response during the Start of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During the first wave of COVID-19, numerous OECD member states introduced short term tenant protection policies, including Austria. The COVID-19-Justiz-Begleitgesetz enacted in early 2020, allowed for deferral of housing rents due between beginning of April and the end of July up to the end of December. Furthermore, the short-term extension of contracts expiring in that period as well as a moratorium on evictions for up to six months were also possible. This paper investigates whether the measures taken succeeded in retaining eviction rates at pre-crisis levels and whether there is significant variation across Austrian states. Although, we saw a clear drop off in the absolute number of evictions from 4208, to 3094, there has already been an ongoing downward trend in eviction cases since 2006, which needs to be considered. Additionally, according to the literature, the most common cause of evictions are arrears in rent payment which are directly linked to disposable income of households. As the pandemic initially led to widespread short-time work schemes and job loss, a sharp rise in eviction cases was anticipated. Thus, both long term trends in evictions as well as underlying economic drivers need to be considered to evaluate the set of anti-eviction policies taken at the federal level. To formally test the hypothesis of reduced eviction cases in 2020 we estimate a Poisson-Panel Model using panel data on evictions and set of socioeconomic indicators observed between 2010 and 2020 across 85 spatial units. We employ Bayesian advanced auxiliary mixture sampling to estimate the econometric model. As theoretical guidance on the driving factors of evictions in Austria and their time structure is very limited, we further implement a Stochastic Search Variable Selection into the MCMC process. We find that eviction rates were reduced significantly during 2020 across states, also after accounting for long term regional trends and pandemic induced economic downturn.