Abstract
Where households choose to live is central to how they adapt to climate risks, yet little is known about adaptation in the rental market, where policy must work through regulation, prices, and information. We study heat-stress adaptation among renters in Paris—a city with pronounced urban-heat-island exposure and neighborhood-based rent control—through a framed field experiment. Renters who intend to move complete a two-part study: a neighborhood-choice module and a real apartment search on a live listing portal, tracked via a browser extension. Within subjects, we deliver information treatments about heat exposure (projected tropical nights) and rent-control ceilings at two levels of aggregation, the neighborhood and the apartment, and elicit incentivized moving intentions before and after each treatment. Between subjects, we randomize incentivized versus hypothetical elicitation, the on-listing salience of the information, and the size of a moving-cost voucher. Using this experimental variation, we estimate a dynamic neighborhood–apartment choice model and recover the willingness to pay to avoid heat at the neighborhood versus apartment level, the disutility of rent, and moving costs. The estimates let us simulate counterfactual information, rent-control, and place- versus building-based adaptation policies, and their welfare consequences.