Publications

Publications:

Slides / Paper /Working Paper 

Levels and trends in inequality cannot be understood without accounting for the role of housing. Housing is a major component of households’ expenditures and the most important and evenly distributed asset in the population. Moreover, regional inequalities may not be as severe as they initially appear after accounting for differences in housing costs across geographies. Conversely, the negative outlook on these inequalities may be exacerbated when considering the implications of households’ uneven sorting within cities – with the most disadvantaged individuals predominantly residing in neighborhoods with lower-quality local public goods and amenities. Sorting endogenously arises due to multiple factors and impacts the dynamics and persistence of inequality through neighborhood effects, with schools playing a crucial role. National housing policies and interventions at the local level can help revert segregation and undesirable inequality dynamics. Housing allowances, tax incentives to build affordable housing in high-income neighborhoods, and school desegregation policies appear to be the most promising avenues to that goal.


Slides / Paper / Vox Column

This paper uses a difference-in-differences (DID) framework to estimate the impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) used to fight the 1918 influenza pandemic and control the resultant mortality in 43 U.S. cities. The results suggest that NPIs such as school closures and social distancing, when applied for a relatively long and sustained time,  might have reduced individual and herd immunity  and the population general health condition, thereby leading to a significantly higher number of  deaths  in subsequent years. 


Slides / Paper

The French rental market is largely unknown despite its considerable weight in public spendings. In this paper we develop a new method based on web scraping to observe the rental market from web activity. We present a new database based on adds posted on the two main French real estate websites between December 2015 and June 2017. After discussing the potential bias caused by the method, we argue that web activity is a faithful way to observe  market rent levels and, on the long run, to follow the dynamics of the rental market. We provide estimates of the level of rent of a representative good in the main French urban areas. Finally, we illustrate one possible use for our database by estimating the distribution of the implicit subsidy related with the access to a social housing unit. 


Slides / Paper / Vox Column

Land is back. The increase in wealth in the second half of 20th century arose from housing and land. It should be taxed. We introduce land and housing structures in Judd's standard setup: first best optimal taxation is achieved with a property tax on land and requires no tax on capital. With positive taxes on housing rents, a first best is still possible but with subsidies to rental housing investments, and either with differential land tax rates or with a tax on imputed rents. It can be taxed. Even absent land taxes, one can tax it indirectly and reach a Ramsey-second best still with no tax on capital and positive housing rent taxes in the steady-state. This result extends to the dynamics under restrictions on parameters.


Slides / Paper

We build a tractable model of frictional labor markets and segmented housing markets to study welfare effects of regulations, including spatial misallocation and deviation from competitive pricing of rents. The model is summarized by a labor demand curve depending on rents and wages, a wage curve reflecting labor market tightness and rents, and finally a rent curve reflecting employment. In this economy, the rent gradient in the flexible rent sector is higher than in a purely competitive housing market. This leads to spatial misallocation due to some employees commuting too much and some non-employed living inefficiently close to jobs. In turn, reducing generalized commuting costs reduces the rent gradient in the flexible rent sector and the cost of spatial misallocation of workers. The reduction in market rents is maximal when labor markets are less frictional and housing markets are more frictional, and welfare gains are larger when both are more efficient. 


Slides / Paper

We show that Paris housing market is dual and that its controlled sector presents a very different rent gradient from the free segment.  We thus develop a model explicitly accounting for the quasi random allocation mechanism between the controlled and uncontrolled sector mimicking the within tenancy control on the private market and waiting lists to access social housing. This allows us to contribute to the literature on rent control by explicitly modeling its  general equilibrium effect at the city level. In this framework the coexistence of a controlled and a free sector increases the spatial mis allocation of households. Moreover, increasing the relative size of the controlled sector might decrease the average rent  but tends to decrease welfare and land capitalization.


Slides / Paper

Housing Tax Credits are a popular tool designed to increase the construction of affordable housing units for low and medium income tenants. Several papers in the US, however, document the lacklustre performance of such programs that represent an important amount of public expenditures. In this paper, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment in France (the removal of the Borloo and Robien policies on part of the territory with the implementation of the Scellier Tax Credit (STC)), to identify the impact of such policies on local housing markets. We find that the removal of these tax credits decreases housing prices and lowers the vacancy rate in new dwellings without reducing the production of new housing units. Finally,  the income profile of tenants in new dwellings remains unaffected.  


Paper in French / Paper in English

The dramatic rise in wealth inequalities has generated debates on the opportunity to tax wealth (Piketty, 2014; Garbinti et al., 2017). Increasing housing prices are, to a great extent, driving these widening wealth disparities. This paper examines the potential redistributive impact of taxing imputed rents, which usually are exempt from income taxation. We estimate tax savings and their distribution between households in France by using a fiscal simulator that Landais et al. (2011) developed. We find that while net imputed rents represent 7% of national net income, their nontaxation amounts to hidden fiscal spending (i.e., tax expenditures) totaling up to 11 billion euros annually. This indicates that nontaxation is the largest public spending directed at homeowners, benefiting mostly the oldest and wealthiest households. Replacing the property tax with imputed rent taxation could favor the youngest and poorest households, who went through a steady decline in their homeownership rates over the past few decades.


Paper

This paper explores the diversity of the social housing stock at the local level. It focuses on four dimensions: the characteristics of the dwellings, the socioeconomic profile of the tenants, the dynamics of construction, and the range of agents who manage this segment of the housing stock. Using data from the Répertoire du Parc Locatif Social (SOeS, 2013) and from the French census (Insee, 2013), we distinguish between ten types of social housing stock in the Paris metropolitan area. First, their contrasts are linked to the characteristics of the dwellings, which are largely inherited from construction policies of the 1960s–1970s. Second, the diversity of the social housing stock is determined by the category of dwellings recently produced according to the type of households they are aimed at. Third, the organization of the social housing policy varies according to the local actors’ interests and objectives, even if housing policies remain strongly centralized in France. Overall, the findings shed more light on the mechanisms that shape specific social housing patterns and enhance the reflection about the relationship between this housing stock and residential segregation dynamics. 


Slides / Paper

In his book, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty highlights the risk of an explosion of wealth inequality because capital is accumulating faster than income in several countries including the US and European countries such as France. Our work challenges the conclusions of the author emphasizing the particular role of the housing market where we observe a dramatic divergence between rents and prices.