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]

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 14% decrease in the size of new housing and an increase in the marginal cost of house size. A quantitative model shows that aggregate welfare results are uncertain, but there is substantial heterogeneity: smaller and poorer households gain up to $8,000 in 2016 dollars compared to larger and wealthier households. These findings highlight the channel by which the MLR can cause disparate effects.

Under review. SSRN Preprint: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6141954

​The Demographic Determinants of Residential Land Use Regulations

I use local variation in World War 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 incentivize households to own (rather than rent) housing, and these increases in homeownership drive the desire to keep housing prices high by restricting supply.

Under review.

The Effect of LIHTC Developments on Neighborhood Political Composition (with Kenneth Whaley)

This paper analyzes individual decisions to stay or move from a residence after nearby construction under the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program. The research design is a spatial difference-in-differences model comparing the choice of registered voters on a block where LIHTC development occurs to those on different blocks in the same block group. To estimate the model we merge three distinct datasets: individual voter records, a panel of residential address history, and data describing LIHTC construction timing. We document a 30% increase in block level in-migration, with preliminary results showing a statistically significant increase in the relative share of Democratic voters. Individual and neighborhood heterogeneity in move responses are explored to understand revealed preferences for affordable housing.

Analyzing the Distributional Effects of New Housing Using Housing Vacancy Chains

Working paper.

The Importance of Preferences in Sectoral Sorting (with John Bound and Joseph Golden)

This paper provides direct evidence that lawyers sort into sectors based on individual preferences. This sorting sustains an equilibrium with large compensating differentials, where lawyers in the nonprofit sector earn substantially less than their private sector counterparts. We show that skill and demographic differences account for little of this gap. We find that nonprofit lawyers place great importance on socially responsible work and less importance on long-term earnings potential. Work-life balance preferences are important but are not as predictive as other preferences. We also document that returns to skill are much higher in the private sector. Consistent with our theory, graduates of higher-ranked law schools who enter the nonprofit sector express especially strong preferences for nonprofit work and have especially large compensating differentials. Cross-sectional wage regressions and panel estimates indicate average compensating differentials of about 45 and 35 log points, respectively, with estimates ranging from 70 to over 100 log points for graduates of top 20 law schools.​

Housing Market Segments, Heterogenous Types, and the Impact of New Development (with Bernardo Modenesi and Jamie Fogel)

Work in progress.