Research

Published & Forthcoming Articles

Tax Refund Uncertainty: Evidence and Welfare Implications | Online Appendix | Replication Package with Sydnee Caldwell and Scott Nelson (2023). AEJ: Applied 15(2): 352-376.

Targeting In-Kind Transfers Through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation | Online Appendix (2021). American Economic Review 111(8): 2660-2696.

Equilibrium Allocations under Alternative Waitlist Designs: Evidence from Deceased Donor Kidneys | Online Appendix | Data Appendix with Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Michael Rees, and Paulo Somaini (2021). Econometrica 89(1): 37-76.

Subsumes "An Empirical Framework for Sequential Assignment: The Allocation of Deceased Donor Kidneys" (NBER Working Paper No. 25607)

Work in Progress

Right-to-Counsel and Rental Housing Markets: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from New York with Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Stephanie Kestelman, Scott Nelson, and Winnie van Dijk. [Draft coming soon]

Right-to-counsel programs provide tenants in eviction court with free legal assistance. Seventeen cities and four states have recently introduced such programs. These programs can improve tenant outcomes in housing court but, when implemented at scale, may also involve cost to tenants due to equilibrium responses in the rental housing market. We empirically study this trade-off leveraging the ZIP-by-ZIP rollout of New York City's right-to-counsel program. Our analysis brings together data sets on eviction court cases, rental housing units, and individual-level earnings. We find robust evidence of price increases in ZIP codes subject to the policy, suggesting landlords passed costs on to renters through higher rental prices. We then develop a framework to evaluate the impact of expanded legal representation on tenant welfare, incorporating the trade-off between higher housing consumption and better court outcomes after default on the one hand, and increased rent prices on the other. We quantify these welfare effects using quasi-experimentally identified parameters. Despite the benefits from higher consumption after default, the estimated price increases are large enough to generate a net reduction in tenant welfare.

Non-Payment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market with John Eric Humphries, Scott Nelson, Dam Linh Nguyen, and Winnie van Dijk. [Draft coming soon]

The social costs of eviction are increasingly well-understood. Less understood is the scope for policy to reduce evictions. We use lease-level ledger data from high-eviction rental markets to study which evictions can be averted, for how long, and with which policies. To do so, we characterize several determinants of the landlord decision to evict: the persistence of shocks to tenant default risk, landlords' information about these shocks, and landlords' costs in the eviction process. We find non-payment is common, but so is recovery; landlords frequently forbear non-payment; and eviction decisions are consistent with landlords learning over time about tenants' evolving non-payment risk. Based on these patterns, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of the eviction decision with which we analyze tenant-protection policy. The estimated model shows that taxes on eviction or subsidies for delinquent tenants are relatively cost-effective and preserve matches for tenants with higher future ability-to-pay. In contrast, in-kind legal aid more effectively targets tenants in the greatest financial distress.

Waiting Time as a Screening Device: Evidence from an Affordable Housing Lottery with Robert Collinson and Winnie van Dijk.