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Working Paper
The effect of local housing ordinances
The housing and economic crises have exerted a strong and lingering impact on housing markets across the nation. In this paper, we assess the degree to which local anti-blight policies have infl uenced housing market outcomes following the crises. The analysis is performed for cities in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. We measure outcomes that characterize market distress and that may be influenced by local housing ordinances including foreclosure, bulk sales, flipping, vacancy, and tax delinquency. Using matching procedures on linked data containing property, loan, and transaction characteristics, we ...
Working Paper
Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities
The standard view of housing markets holds that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply shaped by factors like geography and regulation—explain differences in how house price and quantity growth respond to rising demand across U.S. cities. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same results when we examine rents, expand the sample to 1980 to 2020, use different elasticity measures, use per capita income or ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Land Supply for New Homes on Residential Investment and House Prices
We use parcel-level data to provide new facts on the amount and distribution of land available for residential development, focusing on New England housing markets from 2007 to 2021. Most buildable parcels are small, and large buildable parcels are scarce in most geographic markets. Large buildable parcels are less available in more populous markets, become scarcer as populations grow, and have become scarcer over time. Markets with fewer large parcels experience higher house price growth and residential development that is lower relative to house price growth. We present evidence consistent ...
Working Paper
Flood Risk Mapping and the Distributional Impacts of Climate Information
This paper examines the provision of official flood risk information in the United States and its distributional impacts on residential flood insurance take-up. Assembling new data on all flood maps produced after Hurricane Katrina, I first document that updated maps decreased the number of properties zoned in high-risk floodplains and incorrectly omitted five million properties that should have been rezoned inside these areas. Removals and omissions disproportionately occurred in neighborhoods with more Black and Hispanic residents. Leveraging the staggered timing of map updates, I estimate ...
Working Paper
Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances
This paper tests the effectiveness of vacant property registration ordinances (VPROs) in reducing negative externalities from foreclosures. VPROs were widely adopted by local governments across the United States during the foreclosure crisis and facilitated the monitoring and enforcement of existing property maintenance laws. We implement a border discontinuity design combined with a triple-difference specification to overcome policy endogeneity concerns, and we find that the enactment of VPROs in Florida more than halved the negative externality from foreclosure. This finding is robust to a ...
Working Paper
Capitalization as a Two-Part Tariff: The Role of Zoning
This paper shows that the capitalization of local amenities is effectively priced into land via a two-part pricing formula: a ticket" price paid regardless of the amount of housing service consumed and a slope" price paid per unit of services. We first show theoretically how tickets arise as an extensi ve margin price when there are binding constraints on the number of households admitted to a neighborhood. We use a large national dataset of housing transactions, property characte ristics, and neighbor- hood attributes to measure the extent to which local amenities are capitalized in ticket ...
Working Paper
Zoning and the American Suburb
American suburbs are generally characterized by single-family neighborhoods featuring large lots, with few businesses or apartments. To understand the origins of this pattern of development, we construct the first panel dataset of suburban zoning maps and bylaws for a major American metropolitan area and ask how comprehensive land use regulation shaped the form of the suburbs of Chicago today. Our strategy identifies the impact of zoning using land that was undeveloped before such regulations were adopted. The typical post-zoning suburban neighborhood sets aside over 90 percent of land for ...
Working Paper
Prices versus Quantities Revisited: What Do Policymakers Need to Know to Set Pigouvian Taxes and Subsidies?
What information do policymakers need to design Pigouvian taxes or subsidies? Standard logic suggests that it is sufficient to know the size of the externality and unnecessary to know about quantities. Yet this logic is incorrect if interventions have fixed costs, taxes create deadweight losses, or there are distributional concerns. We present a model in which these considerations can make it more valuable for policymakers to learn about equilibrium quantities. We apply the model to congestion pricing, which has high fixed costs, and to a proposed housing subsidy in Boston that features ...
Journal Article
Housing affordability: recommendations for new research to guide policy
This article highlights areas where economic research is needed to guide federal policymakers addressing the challenge of improving housing affordability. The author places these research recommendations in the framework of five key issues, reflecting policymakers? need to identify a rationale for government action; to employ a single, clear measure to gauge affordability; to understand the unintended consequences of current housing policies; to ensure that the political environment is considered when developing policy; and to decide whether to use housing finance reform as a means of ...
Working Paper
Economic Benefits and Social Costs of Legalizing Recreational Marijuana
We analyze the effects of legalizing recreational marijuana on state economic and social outcomes (2000–20) using difference-in-differences estimation robust to staggered timing and heterogeneity of treatment. We find moderate economic gains accompanied by some social costs. Post-legalization, average state income grew by 3 percent, house prices by 6 percent, and population by 2 percent. However, substance use disorders, chronic homelessness, and arrests increased by 17, 35, and 13 percent, respectively. Although some of our estimates are noisy, our findings suggest that the economic ...