Last site update: 1/15/2015

I am an assistant professor of economics at UCLA.  My research interests are in housing and housing finance, urban economics, consumer finance, and applied microeconomics more broadly.

Working Papers:

What it's about: I use the 2008 conforming loan limit (CLL) increases to study the effect of credit availability on house prices.  I use the original asking price of a home-for-sale as a non-parametric estimate for the likelihood that it will be purchased with a loan in the range affected by the CLL increases.


What it's about: Using the food truck industry as the setting, we show how information technology can complement consumption variety in cities by reducing spatial information frictions associated with locally produced goods.


What it's about: I develop and estimate a structural model of the housing and mortgage markets and investigate a counterfactual in which an alternative mortgage design that shares house price risk between the borrower and lender is introduced.


Published Papers:

Estimates of the Size and Source of Price Declines Due to Nearby Foreclosures (with Elliot Anenberg) -- published in the American Economic Review, Vol. 104 No.8 (August 2014)
What it's about: Using a novel dataset that matches house for-sale listings to housing transactions, we provide new evidence about the magnitude and the mechanisms behind the effect of foreclosures on nearby property values.