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Research Statement

Steve's research examines how neighborhoods and housing shape economic opportunity, safety, and health. Recent projects estimate the neighborhood spillovers of institutional investors converting single-family homes to rentals, the price and distributional effects of flood-risk disclosure on housing platforms, and the long-run benefits of removing lead from children's homes in Colorado and Nebraska. Recent published work on the relationship between schools, neighborhoods and crime shows that attending a school with strict discipline raises adult arrest and incarceration and that school choice lotteries spill over onto the criminality of neighborhood peers. Related work measures the long-run consequences of racial segregation in neighborhoods and schools for educational attainment, crime, and political identity. Ongoing projects evaluate housing for the formerly incarcerated and decision-making tools for parole. Steve's research typically pairs natural and quasi-experiments with linked administrative microdata.

Bio

Steve joined the University of Colorado Boulder in the summer of 2016 and is the Global Real Estate Capital Markets Professor, Professor of Finance, and faculty director of the MS in Real Estate program at the Leeds School of Business. He is an affiliate of J-PAL North America, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at Notre Dame, and the Institute of Behavioral Science at CU Boulder, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and Real Estate Economics. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Colorado, an MA in Economics from the University of Colorado, an MA in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in Economics from Georgetown University. He was previously at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where he was positioned in both economics and public policy and co-directed the Childress Klein Center for Real Estate.

Beyond research, Steve has extensive teaching, consulting, and expert witness experience in policy evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. He is a regular instructor for undergraduate and masters classes in real estate finance and economics and has taught doctoral and masters level courses in cost-benefit analysis and quantitative methods. His applied work includes expert witness testimony on housing and property markets; flood damage estimates from Hurricane Harvey for the federal government; research on the impact of Airbnb on local rental markets; affordable housing assessments for communities throughout Colorado; analysis of the impact of marijuana legalization on property markets; and cost-benefit analyses of downtown business improvement districts for local governments across Colorado.

Memo on HUD Officer Next Door Program (Dec 2023)

Contact Information

Email: stephen.billings@colorado.edu

Twitter: @BillingsEcon