Research

This paper presents an extended housing assignment model that explains the

general equilibrium forces behind cross-segment price spillovers within the same

city. The model highlights the role of supply inequality in determining the size

of these spillovers. Using housing transactions data from 188 US cities between

2000 and 2015, supply-unequal cities with significant demand shocks are shown

to have experienced the greatest cross-segment spillovers. Counterfactual analyses

reveal that equalizing new supply within a city can reduce prices by 5-7% through

price spillovers. These findings offer new insights into the role of supply equity in

addressing housing affordability issues.

(Submitted)

This paper analyzes the effects of a major municipal residential land use reform

on new home construction and developer behavior. We examine Seattle’s Mandatory

Housing Affordability (MHA) program, which relaxed zoning regulations while also

encouraging affordable housing construction in 33 neighborhoods in 2017 and 2019.

The reforms allowed for more dense new development (‘upzoning’), but they also

required developers to either reserve some units of each project as below market rate

rentals or pay into a citywide affordable housing fund. Using a difference-in-differences

estimation comparing areas the reforms affected versus those not affected, we show new

construction differentially fell in the upzoned, affordability-mandated census blocks.

Our quasi-experimental border design finds strong evidence of developers strategically

siting projects away from MHA-zoned plots – despite their upzoning – and instead to

nearby blocks and parcels not subject to the program’s affordability requirements. The

differential reduction from MHA to non-MHA zones could be as large as 70% of average

permitting activity at the border. Lowrise multifamily and mixed-use development. Our

findings speak to the mixed results of allowing for more density while simultaneously

mandating affordable housing for the same project.

SSRN

NYU Furman Center and Pew Charitable Trust, Learning from Land Use Reforms Series, May 2023

HUD Office of Policy Development and Research, Cityscape 25(2), July 2023: 259-279

This paper explores the effect of telecommunications infrastructure within cities on the growth of population and employment from 1990 to 2010 in the U.S. The backbone infrastructure that enables the deployment of these technological advancements plays an important role in shaping economic geography. We use a novel instrumental variable to deal with the endogeneity issues that uses 1909 long-haul telecommunications infrastructure map. Preliminary results show that the initial stock of “information highway” does have a positive effect on where people are located in 2010. 

Chinese real estate market has been characterized by a puzzling divergence in prices across different property sector’s land values within the same city land market. This paper finds that the strategic interplay between local governments is the key driver in high local residential land prices and low industrial land prices. Local governments have incentives to offer industrial land to firms at a hugely discounted rate in order to attract them at the expense of limiting residential land thus pushing up residential land prices. The political strategic play has economic effects well beyond the immediate land revenue that the local government targets, and have long-lasting impacts for city, regional and national industrial compositions and structural economic changes.