Research

This paper examines the drivers behind within-city house price volatility across U.S. metropolitan areas, highlighting the impact of supply-side differences. It documents supply inequality within local markets, even in cities with slow demand growth, and uses an assignment model framework to demonstrate how this inequality rationalizes segmented price volatility. The study analyzes data from 188 cities between 2000 and 2015, revealing distinct patterns during boom, bust, and recovery periods. Results indicate that unequal supply distribution affects price dynamics and affordability, with counterfactual analyses suggesting that redistributing new housing supply more evenly could mitigate price pressures.

(Submitted, draft available upon request)

This paper examines the impact of Seattle's Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program on new home construction and developer behavior. Implemented in 2017 and 2019 across 33 neighborhoods, Seattle's MHA program relaxed zoning regulations (`upzoning') while requiring developers to either reserve some units of each project as below-market-rate rentals or contribute to a citywide affordable housing fund. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that new construction differentially declined in the upzoned, affordability-mandated areas. Our quasi-experimental border design reveals that developers intentionally avoided MHA-zoned areas -- despite their upzoning-- opting instead to build on nearby blocks without affordability requirements.  The differential reduction in new housing permitting between MHA and non-MHA zones could be as large as 70%, with the low-rise multifamily segment driving most of this decline. Our findings underscore the complex trade-offs between increasing density and mandating affordable housing within the same development.

SSRN

Policy discussions

1. Referenced in New York Times article, Why Does This House Have a Skybridge?, by Jane C. Hu and Ruth Fremson, NYTimes.com, 27 June 2025, 9:00am.

2. Referenced in Seattle's NPR affiliate KUOW , "Is that a skybridge? Developers find creative solution to add density", by Patricia Murphy and Andy Hurst, July 2nd 2025. link

3. Featured in UCLA Housing Voice, episode of "Upzoning With Strings Attached", by Jake Krimmel, September 2024, link

4. Featured in Land Use Reforms Series, by NYU Furman Center and Pew Charitable Trust, Learning from Land Use Reforms Series, May 2023

5. Published as Policy Brief by the 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.