Airbnb and Returns to Housing Capital: Evidence on Inequality from administrative Data

This paper examines the distributional implications of Airbnb income using matched administrative data combining transaction-level tourist tax records, cadastral data, and household tax data from the La Rochelle coastal urban area in France. We conceptualize short-term rentals as a mechanism enabling households to extract an intermittent tourist rent from housing assets. Using a Heckman selection model, we distinguish between participation in Airbnb activity and revenues conditional on participation. The results show that higherincome households are more likely to participate in Airbnb hosting, but that higher revenues are driven primarily by price premium rather than rental intensity. This suggests that Airbnb amplifies unequal returns associated with heterogeneous housing assets rather than differences in hosting effort. At the same time, Airbnb income represents a substantial share of disposable income for some lower-income households. The paper highlights the dual role of short-term rentals as both a mechanism reinforcing income concentration and a source of temporary income buffering.