Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls
In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent [...]
Affordable Housing and City Welfare
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 [...]
Should Law Subsidize Driving?
A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, [...]
Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal
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 [...]
Neighbors’ Income, Public Goods and Well-Being
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 [...]
Amenities, Affordability, and Housing Vouchers
An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by [...]
Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates
Previous literature has shown that land use regulations influence where people choose to live within the U.S. by impacting housing prices. In this paper, we study the impact of these [...]
The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018
As the inaugural State of the Nation’s Housing report noted, the majority of Americans were well housed in 1988, and a number of metrics point to improving conditions since then. [...]
Land Concentration and Long-Run Development: Evidence from the Frontier United States
Worldwide, land ownership is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of communities founded in the frontier [...]
The vertical city: Rent gradients, spatial structure, and agglomeration economies
Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that [...]