Do Landlords Respond to Wage Policy? Estimating the Minimum Wage Effect on Apartment Rent Prices

My primary data source is RealPage, Inc.—a company that surveys multifamily rental properties to provide rental market analytics and property management services to landlords—which collects data on thousands of apartment buildings throughout the U.S. This dataset allows me to track each individual property's best available asking rent, aggregated across floor plans, on a monthly basis beginning in 2010. For minimum wage policies, I use data from Vaghul and Zipperer (2022) that track monthly statutory minimum wage schedules in the United States. I merge these schedules onto the RealPage data at the census block level to obtain the effective local minimum wage schedule for every apartment. Therefore, each apartment is assigned the minimum wage policy that applies to the census block in which it is located. Census blocks are the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau and represent a notably narrow geographic focus, with urban census blocks resembling city blocks.