| Sumario: | We offer a first approach to the demand and supply structure of Airbnb in Mexico City using a unique panel dataset of daily listings and rentals on the platform. We find descriptive evidence of a large sector of professional hosts. We estimate various models of demand accommodating price endogeneity and taste heterogeneity, as well as a supply model under the assumption of Bertrand-Nash's competition. We consistently find that professional hosts have lower marginal costs than nonprofessional hosts. We also find that overall price-cost margins are high regardless of hosts' professionalization status, and slightly higher in the case of professional ones. Finally, motivated by a worldwide regulatory trend, we investigate counterfactually the effect of producer and consumer ad valorem taxes that discriminate between types of hosts.
|
|---|
