Last site update: 7/21/2017

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

Working Papers:

What it's about: Using a comprehensive dataset of Airbnb listings from the whole United States, we assess the impact of home-sharing on residential house prices and rental rates.  


What it's about: We use a directed search model to show how the housing market responds to an interest rate shock through both transaction prices and liquidity.  The implication is that the house price response does not fully capture the underlying change to the valuation of housing.


Measuring Mortgage Credit Availability: A Frontier Estimation Approach (with Elliot Anenberg, Aurel Hizmo and Raven Molloy) -- submitted
What it's about: We construct a new measure of mortgage credit availability, the "loan frontier", that can be interpreted as the maximum mortgage amount obtainable by a borrower of given characteristics.  



What it's about: We study the biases that result from ignoring credit constraints in revealed preference models.  We use a dataset that merges housing transactions with buyer credit reports to demonstrate the bias in willingness-to-pay for school quality.

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.

(replaces previous papers on continuous workout mortgages)
What it's about: I develop an equilibrium model of housing and mortgage markets where house prices, mortgage interest rates, and leverage ratios are determined endogenously.  Counterfactuals related to mortgage credit availability and mortgage contract design are explored.  General equilibrium effects are shown to be important.


Published Papers:

Information Technology and Product Variety in the City: The Case of Food Trucks (with Elliot Anenberg) -- published in the Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 90 (November 2015)
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.

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.