reference library

American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American…
Read more

Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations…
Read more

The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
Read more

Measuring how rent-controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to rent increases is difficult, because new construction is automatically exempt. This paper explores evictions as a barometer for landlords’…
Read more

This paper provides the first, comprehensive evidence on the question of whether the subsidized flood insurance rates are needed to meet the affordability goal of the National Flood Insurance Program….
Read more

Scholars and policymakers have identified neighborhood activism and participation as a valuable source of policy information and civic engagement. Yet, these venues may be biasing policy discussions in favor of…
Read more

In the rogues’ gallery of regulatory rent-seeking, copyright and patent laws are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. According to the ingenious and highly effective rhetoric of their beneficiaries and supporters,…
Read more

Zoning ordinances and the like have been endemic in the United States for the better part of a century. These laws have always influenced the location of housing within a…
Read more

“California has a serious housing shortage. California’s housing costs, consequently, have been rising rapidly for decades. These high housing costs make it difficult for many Californians to find housing that…
Read more

Because of a severe shortage of affordable housing in the United States, an increasing number of low-income households suffer from housing instability. However, little evidence exists as to why they…
Read more

I study the short-run effect of new housing construction on housing affordability using individual address history data. Because most new construction is expensive, its effect on the market for more…
Read more

Does owning property influence how individuals engage in the political process? This is a fundamental question in political economy, and a timely one given recent interest in understanding “NIMBYism” and…
Read more

How does neighbors’ income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich US local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live…
Read more

The nation’s 11.2 million extremely low income renter households account for 25.7% of all renter households and 9.5% of all households in the United States. The U.S. has a shortage…
Read more

Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in…
Read more

Housing is the most important asset for the vast majority of American households and a key driver of racial disparities in wealth. This paper studies how residential segregation by race…
Read more

“Housing is a central component of family life and can provide a foundation for family well-being. While we typically think of family households as homeowners, renters are more likely than…
Read more

Hence this report, which aims to help leaders understand how, and how much, changing demands for place are influencing the clustering of jobs both across and within metropolitan areas. The…
Read more

This paper presents evidence that job suburbanization caused significant declines in black employment from 1970 to 2000. I document that, conditional on detailed job characteristics, blacks are less likely than…
Read more

Policymakers must focus on improving the jobs-housing fit—or connecting jobs with affordable housing—which is essential for working families and for the economy. Michela Zonta Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing…
Read more

This paper estimates the link between population density and COVID-19 spread and severity in the contiguous United States. To overcome confounding factors, we use two Instrumental Variable (IV) strategies that…
Read more

Commentators have long decried the pernicious effects that overly restrictive land use regulations, which stifle new development, have on housing supply and affordability, regional and national economic growth, social mobility,…
Read more

A fatal conflict in the legal definition of family lurks at the intersection of family law and zoning law. Family law doctrines have increasingly embraced the claims of “functional families”—those…
Read more

This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation…
Read more

We study gentrification at a micro-geographic scale using information on residents and businesses in New York from 1990 to 2010. We exploit atypical location decisions of businesses to identify the…
Read more

There is significant evidence that restrictions on residential land use reduce housing supply, increase house prices, and limit inflows of low‐income households. Local decision‐makers often argue that their efforts are…
Read more

Growing numbers of affordable housing advocates and community members are questioning the premise that increasing the supply of market-rate housing will result in housing that is more affordable. This article…
Read more

What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood…
Read more

The problem of local-government barriers to housing supply is finally enjoying its moment in the sun. For decades, the states did little to remedy this problem and arguably they made…
Read more

Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these…
Read more

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a major social concern in the United States and other developed countries. There is an extensive economic literature estimating the social costs associated with SUDs…
Read more

Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by…
Read more

Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in…
Read more

We explore the impact of rising incomes at the top of the distribution on spatial sorting patterns within large U.S. cities. We develop and quantify a spatial model of a…
Read more

More than half of the nation’s households are now headed by someone at least 50 years of age. These 65 million older households are highly diverse in their living situations,…
Read more

We develop two search-theoretic models emphasizing firm entry to examine the Oswald hypothesis, the idea that homeownership is linked to inferior labor market outcomes, and compare their predictions to three…
Read more

Since the ’80s the US has experienced not only a steady increase in income inequality, but also a contemporaneous increase in residential segregation by income. Using US Census data, we…
Read more

This report finds that increases in housing prices in San Francisco were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides evidence…
Read more

Like many large metropolitan areas, the Washington D.C. region faces a housing supply crunch. From 2010 to 2016, the population grew roughly twice as fast as the number of housing…
Read more

This report finds that increases in housing prices in Contra Costa County were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides…
Read more

This report finds that increases in housing prices in Alameda County were correlated with shifts in where low-income people of color lived between 2000 and 2015. It also provides evidence…
Read more

This study shows that the homeownership rate for millennials was 37 percent in 2015, or about eight percentage points lower than that of the two previous generations (Gen X and…
Read more

Whether Bay Area residents like it or not, city leaders across the country are watching how this high-tech region grapples with the consequences of dizzying economic growth — expensive housing,…
Read more

In D.C. and around the country, inclusionary zoning (also sometimes called “inclusionary housing”), is an increasingly popular way to produce affordable housing through the private market. And while these programs…
Read more

We estimate the local and aggregate effects of total factor productivity growth on US workers’ earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find…
Read more

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such…
Read more

Housing is the most important asset for the vast majority of American households and a key driver of racial disparities in wealth. This paper studies how residential segregation by race…
Read more

This is the first paper that studies the effects of including non-monetary income from housing (imputed rent) in the measure of income on intergenerational income mobility. Using national panel data…
Read more

The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to…
Read more

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of…
Read more

We examined whether the Gautreaux residential mobility program, which moved poor black volunteer families who were living in inner-city Chicago into more-affluent and integrated neighborhoods, produced long-run improvements in the…
Read more

By enabling low-income families to move from high- to low-poverty neigh- bourhoods, tenant-based rental subsidies for poor families have the potential to reduce the degree of economic segregation in the…
Read more

This chapter explores the potential importance of local housing market regulation in determining homelessness in the U.S. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the connection between the operation of…
Read more

Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans in August of 2005, devastating the built environment and displacing nearly one-third of the city’s residents. Despite the considerable literature that exists…
Read more

This report highlights the financial stress facing teachers in regions of fast economic growth and high property values. Teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area report far greater financial anxiety…
Read more

Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
Read more

We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past…
Read more

Recent research has related characteristics of cities to differences in the distribution of wages across workers with different skill levels. We demonstrate that these differences in wage differentials arise naturally…
Read more

Social capital is often place-specific while schooling is portable, so the prospect of migration may reduce the returns to social capital and increase the returns to schooling. If social capital…
Read more

What impact does inequality have on metropolitan areas? Crime rates are higher in places with more inequality, and people in unequal cities are more likely to say that they are…
Read more

This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting…
Read more

The strong negative correlation between a city’s level of residential racial segregation and its outcomes, particularly for black residents, is well-established. The interpretation of this relationship, however, is confounded by…
Read more

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize…
Read more

The Coase theorem presents two criteria for evaluating regulation: regulations efficiency relative to private solutions and how the regulation affects the distribution of wealth. Previous studies of the impact of…
Read more

We study optimal spatial policies in quantitative trade and geography frameworks with spillovers and sorting of heterogeneous workers. We characterize the spatial transfers that must hold in efficient allocations, as…
Read more

Based on two surveys of 490 Californian cities and counties, the study examines the effects of local growth-control enactment between 1979 and 1988 on net housing construction between 1980 and…
Read more

When competitive landowners/developers control incorporation and zoning decisions, efficient patterns of development emerge. When, by contrast, early arrivals control policy, they may impose zoning restrictions that force later entrants to…
Read more

Both large bodies of water and local governments restrict the supply of urban land. In this paper we measure water’s restriction on supply and test its effect on land price….
Read more

Theories about the importance of space in urban labor markets have emphasized the role of employment access, on the one hand, and neighborhood composition, on the other hand, in affecting…
Read more

[We show] in our model that the primary beneficiaries of growth controls are owners of developed land, e.g., homeowners, while the primary losers are owners of undeveloped land. Since the…
Read more

This paper uses the U.S. Federal Courts to study the impact of government power of eminent domain on growth and inequality. Since the 1950s, Republican judges with prior experience advocating…
Read more

This paper analyzes a model in which housing tenure choice serves as a means of screening households with different utilization rates. If the proportion of low-utilization types is small, there…
Read more

Home ownership near the workplace has become unattainable for many working Americans. Despite the overall increase in national home-ownership rates, according to the Urban Land Institute, “[a] rapid population rise…
Read more

It has frequently been emphasized by courts and commentators that the power to award variances should be exercised sparingly and that a variance should be awarded only if it will…
Read more

Across the diverse landscape of land use matters, few regulatory issues and approval processes elicit as much emotion and opposition as planning and zoning decisions relating to housing for persons…
Read more

In the postwar era, developed economies have experienced two substantial trends in the net capital share of aggregate income: a rise during the last several decades, which is well known,…
Read more

In 1980, housing prices in the main US cities rose with distance to the city center. By 2010, that relationship had reversed. We propose that this development can be traced…
Read more

We test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 Local…
Read more

Piketty documents how the share of aggregate income going to capital in the United States has risen in the post-war era. Rognlie has since shown that this is largely due…
Read more

Gentrification has provoked considerable controversy surrounding its effects on residential displacement. Using a unique individual-level, longitudinal data set, this study examines mobility rates and residential destinations of residents in gentrifying…
Read more

We estimate the causal effect of each county in the U.S. on children’s incomes in adulthood. We first estimate a fixed effects model that is identified by analyzing families who…
Read more

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decline in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to wealthy places. These changes coincide with (1) an…
Read more

The report finds that a significant pressure on the District’s housing market is the fierce competition for larger units from affluent singles and couples. The District has many more larger…
Read more