ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

JUE Insight: How much does COVID-19 increase with mobility? Evidence from New York and four other U.S. cities (With Edward L. Glaeser and Stephen J. Redding), Journal of Urban Economics, 127, February 2022.

How Regressive Are Mobility-Related User Fees and Gasoline Taxes? (with Ed Glaeser and Jim Poterba), NBER Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 37, August 2023.

Working Papers

Global Capital and Local Assets: House Prices, Quantities, and Elasticities (with Benjamin Keys). December, 2023. Revise & Resubmit, Review of Financial Studies.

We examine the impact of foreign purchases in the U.S. housing market, and exploit foreign demand shocks to estimate local price elasticities of supply. Other countries introduced foreign-buyer taxes beginning in 2011, intended to deter foreign housing investment. After 2011, we show house prices grew 6 to 9 percentage points more in U.S. zipcodes with high foreign born populations; this growth reversed after 2017. These international tax policy changes act as a U.S. housing demand shock, instrumenting for endogenous capital flows. We find that global capital inflows contributed to a 3% annual increase in prices and 0.5% increase in quantities over 2011–2018 for the average U.S. city. The ratio of these two elasticities yields a new estimate of the local house price elasticity of supply, which we construct for 100 U.S. cities. These supply elasticities average 0.26 and vary between 0.06 and 0.9, establishing that local housing markets exhibit substantial spatial heterogeneity and are more inelastic than estimated in prior decades.

Ridesharing and the Redistribution of Economic Activity, July 2024. Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Urban Economics.

Awards: UEA Best PhD Paper (Honorable Mention), 2019; EMUEA Kraks Fond Prize (Runner Up), 2019; OSU PhD Conference on Real Estate and Housing (Best Paper Award), 2019.

This paper studies how improvements in local accessibility influence cities’ distributions of nontradeable amenities, housing costs and welfare. I build a model of local demand for these amenities, which depends on travel times and costs. Ridesharing’s entry shocks these times and costs. Three years after entry, amenities grow faster in areas which are driving-accessible and transit-inaccessible. In these locations, median house prices and rents rise by 3% and 1% per year, respectively. Taken together, the improvements in amenities and access outpace the rising housing costs. All residents benefit from ridesharing, although homeowners’ benefits are four times larger than renters’.

The Financial Consequences of Wanting to Own a Home (with Gregor Schubert) November, 2024

Selected Presentations: Pre-WFA Summer Real Estate Research Symposium 2023, NBER SI 2023 (Real Estate); BFI Women in Empirical Micro; Utah Eccles Housing Affordability Summit

Homeownership has long been a core tenet of the American Dream, and is targeted by policy-markers as a key channel for wealth formation. In this paper, we study the causal effects of the desire to own a home on tenure choice and portfolio choice among immigrants to the U.S. We show that having high homeownership in their country of origin (“HOCO”) has a robustly positive effect on tenure choices for foreign-born U.S. residents in line with a cultural transmission of homeownership norms across countries: a 10 pp higher homeownership in the country of origin is associated with a 1.5 pp higher likelihood of being a homeowner after coming to the U.S. We show in a simple tenure choice model how this higher affinity can affect not just average homeownership, but also the responsiveness of households to credit supply shocks and test this prediction empirically. Using an exogenous credit shock based on county exposure to lenders that are increasing their mortgage lending nationally, we show that, in response to a 1 SD mortgage credit shock, above-median HOCO residents see a 5-year increase in their homeownership rate that is 1 pp larger than below-median-HOCO groups. We also find that high HOCO households are less likely to default on their mortgage payments. At retirement, high HOCO households are more likely to own a home, have a greater share of their portfolio invested in real estate, and end up with greater total wealth. These findings imply that an affinity for homeownership is an important driver of financial outcomes for households and impacts the effectiveness of policies targeted at homeownership rates.

Impact of Institutional Owners on Housing Markets (with Franklin Qian and Zipei Zhu) April 2024.

Selected Presentations: Baruch College (Zicklin) (scheduled), Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (scheduled), CU Boulder (Leeds), 2024 Stanford SITE for Housing and Urban Economics, Cornell Real Estate Symposium, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2024 Pre-WFA Summer Real Estate Research Symposium, 2nd Annual Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality, CICF 2024, ITAM Finance Conference 2024, RERI Annual Conference 2024

Since the Great Recession, the rise of single-family rental companies has changed the investor ownership landscape in the U.S. Using housing transaction data, we document the rise of Long Term Rental (LTR) companies by constructing a panel of national single-family housing portfolios. We show that LTR growth outstripped all other investor types and that these companies geographically concentrate their holdings, expanding their local market shares over time. We construct a novel instrument predicting LTR entry, leveraging differential revealed preferences in product characteristics across landlord types, interacting with a proxy for falling property management costs over time. We use this instrument for LTR market entry to estimate the causal impact of LTR market share on local house prices. We find that a 1-standard deviation above the mean increase in LTR share growth leads to an annual additional house price growth of 2.11pp. Finally, we discuss how the reallocation of homeownership across small and large landlords, as well as owner-occupants and investors, contribute to these price increases.

 

Other Publications


Understanding the Ballot Question That Could Reshape Rideshare and Gig Driving, with Evan Horowitz. Center for State Policy Analysis, Tisch College, Tufts University, 2022.

Your Uber Has Arrived: How Ridesharing Expands Access, Increases Emissions, and Changes Cities. Kleinman Center for Energy Policy Digest, 2019.

Underwater and Drowning? Some Facts about Mortgages that Could Be Targeted by Eminent Domain, with Andreas Fuster. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics, 2013.