Research
House Size, Household Size, and Income: The Distributional Effects of the Minimum Lot Size Regulation
["Honorable Mention" for Best Student Paper Prize at the 2022 Urban Economics Association Conference in DC]
["Is affordability just 'you get what you pay for'?" Market Urbanism Blog discussion of my paper]
Under review.
["Is affordability just 'you get what you pay for'?" Market Urbanism Blog discussion of my paper]
Under review.
The minimum lot size regulation (MLR) bundles large land plots with housing structure, disproportionately affecting smaller and lower-income households. I show that Houston’s reduction of the MLR in 1999 led to a 15% decrease in the size of new housing and an increase in the marginal cost of house size. Using a quantitative model of housing demand disciplined by empirical results from Houston, I estimate that smaller and poorer households gain up to $10,000 in 2016 dollars compared to larger and wealthier households. These findings highlight the channel by which the MLR can cause disparate effects.
The Demographic Determinants of Housing Regulations: Explaining the Relationships Between Fertility, Homeownership, and the Political Economy Equilibria
Being revised for submission.
I use local variation in World II mobilization to investigate the effects of fertility booms on the development of restrictive residential land use regulations. Places with larger fertility booms after World War II had larger increases in homeownership and subsequently developed more restrictive housing and land use regulations. These results are consistent with a standard political economy model where increased housing needs incentivizes households to own (rather than rent) housing, and these increases in homeownership drive the desire to keep housing prices high by restricting supply.
I use local variation in World II mobilization to investigate the effects of fertility booms on the development of restrictive residential land use regulations. Places with larger fertility booms after World War II had larger increases in homeownership and subsequently developed more restrictive housing and land use regulations. These results are consistent with a standard political economy model where increased housing needs incentivizes households to own (rather than rent) housing, and these increases in homeownership drive the desire to keep housing prices high by restricting supply.
Analyzing the Distributional Effects of New Housing Using Housing Vacancy Chains
Working paper.
The Importance of Preferences in Sectoral Sorting (with John Bound, Joseph Golden, and Ben Thompson)
Working paper.
Housing Submarket Definitions and the Impact of New Development (with Bernardo Modenesi and Jamie Fogel)
Work in progress.