Rent control and administrative luxury: when regulatory authority institutes luxury

In France, a lot of rent markets are said to be “saturated”, which means that there exists a structural dwelling disequilibrium between demand and supply. In some cities, finding a place to stay is becoming a challenging task. This is the case, inter alia, for Paris. Thus, a rent control has been coerced in 2019. It is today effective in few other cities in France: Lille, Lyon, Villeurbanne, Plaine Commune, Est Ensemble. This rent control limits rent amount with respect to room counts, typology (furnished or not), construction period and administrative suburb of the dwelling.However, despite the rent control, we observe that some leases exceed the ceiling fixed. By doing so, the introduction of a ceiling places all leases that exceed the latter in the category of administrative luxury goods. In this research, we observe what causes these exceedances: is it about the intrinsic characteristics of dwelling (high floor, Haussmannian, large surface); about the extrinsic characteristics (green spaces proximity, iconic monuments); both? Or is it about an a priori conception of the regulatory authority, as quality and luxury are mostly a matter of perception (Zeithalm (1988), Walls (2011))?The "superstar" approach, developed by Rosen (1981), is an interesting benchmark to understand from where comes administrative luxury. This approach states that there is a "superstars’ phenomenon" in the economy, when a "small number of people earn enormous amount of money and dominates the activity in which they engage". Applied to the housing market, Gyourko et al. (2013) find that there exists "Superstar cities", in which there is an inelastic supply of land which increases house prices and crowd out lower income households.Is there "superstar suburbs" in Paris, where exceedance frequency is higher? Or is it generalizable to Paris as a whole? Has living in Paris become a luxury?