Working Papers

Daly, I. (2025). Threshold-Based Regulation and Redevelopment: Evidence from a Built-Out Metropolitan Market.
Working Paper. (PDF - Job Market Paper)

Abstract

How does threshold-based land-use regulation affect development when urban production occurs through redevelopment rather than greenfield expansion? Standard notch models predict that developers respond to discrete regulatory costs by bunching below thresholds, reducing project scale, or abandoning marginal projects. This paper shows that these predictions are incomplete in built-out markets, where inherited structures make project size lumpy and shift adjustment toward project form. I study the 2019 tightening of the Paris Region's "procédure d'agrément", an administrative approval procedure that increased regulatory costs for large net additions of office and tertiary floor area within a fixed perimeter. Using a border-based difference-in-discontinuities design, I compare municipalities located just inside and just outside the regulated boundary before and after the reform. I find no robust evidence of bunching below the regulatory threshold and little evidence of a sharp contraction in non-residential expansion. Nor does the reform generate systematic housing gains. Instead, adjustment occurs through redevelopment margins: non-residential permits become more likely to involve housing displacement and transformation without extension, while residential permits become more likely to involve works on existing structures, demolition, tertiary transformation, and housing loss. Transaction evidence indicates that non-residential values increase significantly after the reform, whereas residential values remain unchanged. These findings show that threshold-based regulation can bind without generating the canonical quantity responses emphasized in notch models. In dense urban markets, regulatory incidence may operate through the reorganization of inherited built capital rather than through aggregate construction volumes.

Daly, I. & Lefebre, M. (2026). Housing Tenure, Housing-Market Tightness, and Family Households: The Role of Social Housing in France.(PDF)

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between housing tenure, local housing-market tightness, and the presence of minor children in households in metropolitan France. We use the 2023--2024 French Housing Survey and a sample of women aged 18 to 45 living in private rental housing, social housing, or owner-occupied dwellings. Weighted logit models and adjusted probabilities show that the gap between social and private renters is concentrated in tight housing markets. Analyses restricted to families nevertheless indicate that social housing does not provide a spatial advantage: conditional on observed characteristics, social renters have less floor space per person and more often report an insufficient number of rooms. Social housing therefore appears to be a potential channel of residential access for families in tight markets, but one involving a trade-off in housing space. The estimates are associational and should not be interpreted as causal effects.