Research

Publications

Spillover Effects of Accessory Dwelling Unit Development

Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 114, September 2025, 104136 [RSUE Link] [SSRN Link]

Promoting accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small residential backyard units, is one way that state and local governments have attempted to boost housing supply amid rising housing costs. However, homeowners worry about the impact on property values due to increased population and density. This paper studies the effect of ADU development on neighboring property values using an instrumental variable approach. I find that a 0.5 percentage point increase (the mean ADU concentration over the sample period of 2013–2021) in ADU density leads to a 3% decrease in nearby property prices. The negative spillover effects remain consistent within a 300-meter radius, after which they become statistically insignificant. The results are robust across alternative specifications and samples and the adverse effects of ADUs are more pronounced for properties with smaller lot sizes and those in low- and middle-rent neighborhoods. I provide evidence that ADU growth contributes to neighborhood externalities, including increased parking citations, domestic violence reports, illegal dumping, and neighborhood service requests, while showing no significant effects on overall or property crime.

Working Papers

Upzoning and Neighborhood Change: Evidence from Los Angeles

Housing affordability is a pressing challenge in the United States, with rising costs placing significant financial strain on communities. In response, local governments are exploring policies to enhance residential development and increase housing supply. A common strategy is upzoning, which involves relaxing land use regulations to facilitate denser housing. Using property characteristics and consumer trace data, I show that easing zoning requirements increases housing supply, as measured by the number of units, without altering the size of units. I also find that upzoning leads to higher house prices. The zoning change also triggers demographic shifts, including a greater share of in-migrant households that are non-Hispanic White. On the other hand, out-migration does not vary by race or ethnicity. I also find that in-migrants do not come from higher-income neighborhoods, but out-migrants tend to move to tracts with slightly higher median incomes. Additionally, I assess spillover effects within a 2-mile radius of the treated zones, revealing delayed increases in housing units, and house prices within a mile of Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) areas. These findings are robust to a triple difference-in-differences specification, confirming that the observed changes are attributable to the TOC program rather than confounding factors.

The Direct and Local Spillover Effects of Subsidized Housing Investment: Evidence from a Tax Credit Lottery

(with Matthew Freedman and Wyatt Clarke)

This paper examines the private response to tax incentives for residential investment as well as the nature and scope of housing externalities by exploiting the lottery structure of Missouri’s Neighborhood Preservation Act (NPA). The NPA offers tax credits to homeowners and developers that improve or expand the owner-occupied housing stock in low-income areas. Taking advantage of the random assignment of NPA tax credits together with detailed property-level data, we find that the program increases construction activity over and above that which would have occurred in its absence. NPA-induced investments also translate into positive albeit imprecisely measured changes in property values. However, we find no evidence that NPA-subsidized investment affects neighbors’ investment behavior or nearby property values. The results highlight the limits of housing improvement policies in spurring broad-based neighborhood change where it would not happen otherwise.

Mass Reproducibility and Replicability:  A New Hope R&R at Nature 

(See list of authors on pages 2-3) 

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators’ experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes.

Work in Progress

The Housing Supply and Price Effects of Reducing Parking Requirements in U.S. Cities

The Effect of Airbnb Restrictions on the Local Labor Market

Spatial and Network Perspectives on Employment Multipliers and Urban Development: The Case of Zonas Francas (with Santiago Campos-Rodríguez)

Policy Research and Report

Evaluating the Potential for Housing Development in Transportation-Efficient and Healthy, High-Opportunity Areas in California

(with Nicholas J. Marantz, Huixin Zheng, Jae Hong Kim, Doug Houston, Moira O’Neill, Eric Biber, Youjin B. Kim)

This report identifies transportation-efficient, healthy, high-opportunity areas for housing development. Adding housing in these areas could promote housing affordability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while contributing to enhanced socioeconomic mobility and more equitable development patterns. The development potential in the identified areas, according to data provided by regional planning organizations and local jurisdictions, substantially exceeds the number of existing units, but the layering of regulatory restrictions may impede development at the putatively planned densities. This report therefore identifies enhanced data collection procedures and policy levers to promote development in the identified areas. The policy levers include regulatory changes to expedite the approval of infill housing, to increase the financial feasibility of infill housing, and to more effectively target regulatory requirements related to the provision of below-market-rate housing units.