Working Papers
Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing (Job Market Paper)
Abstract (click to expand)
This paper studies the long-term neighborhood effects of the construction of mid-century American public housing. I construct a new national dataset tracking the locations, completion dates, and characteristics of over 1 million public housing units built between 1935 and 1973, which I link to neighborhood-level data from 1930 to 2010. I document that public housing projects were systematically targeted toward poorer, more populous neighborhoods with higher Black population shares, consistent with the program's slum clearance goals and racialized site selection politics. Using a stacked matched difference-in-differences design, I find that public housing construction caused large, persistent increases in Black population shares and substantial declines in median incomes and rents. Geographic spillovers to nearby neighborhoods were modest: Black population shares increased slightly, driven primarily by white population decline rather than Black inflows. I find evidence consistent with neighborhood tipping: neighborhoods with initially moderate Black shares experienced substantial white population outflows. Finally, linking to intergenerational mobility data, I show that children from low-income families who grew up in tracts containing public housing experienced significantly lower rates of upward mobility than those in comparable control areas. These findings demonstrate that mid-century public housing, despite intentions of neighborhood revitalization, reinforced existing patterns of racial and economic segregation with lasting consequences for economic opportunity.Featured In: Marginal Revolution
Taming the Growth Machine: The Long-Run Consequences of Federal Urban Planning Assistance (with Tianfang Cui)
Abstract (click to expand)
We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. We digitize program records and link them to a municipality-level panel on housing and zoning outcomes. We identify causal effects using variation in program eligibility and differences in state agencies' capacity to approve funding. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered development in assisted areas away from apartments and towards larger single-family homes. Drawing on text data from newspaper articles that cover local regulation and development politics, we show that recipients placed a greater burden on developers to fund local amenities since the 1980s. These findings demonstrate that subsidizing planning expertise under decentralized land-use authority generated durable market frictions, with lasting consequences for national housing affordability.Featured In: Marginal Revolution
Does Strengthening Rent Control Reduce Housing Quality? Evidence from New York City
Abstract (click to expand)
This paper studies how New York's 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) affected housing quality and investment. HSTPA eliminated vacancy decontrol and sharply limited rent increases for capital improvements, weakening landlords' incentives to invest in rent-stabilized buildings. Using building-level panel data on housing code violations, tenant complaints, and building permits in a difference-in-differences design, I find that HSTPA reduced housing quality and investment: immediately hazardous violations increased by 36%, or approximately 23,000 additional violations per year, tenant complaints increased by 13%, and building permit activity declined by 25%. These effects are sharply unequal: immediately hazardous violations increased around three to four times more in lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods with higher non-white population shares. These results provide new evidence on the maintenance, investment, and distributional effects of modern rent regulation.Work in Progress
The Effects of the H-1B Program on Small Firms: Evidence From Visa Lotteries (with Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih, Parag Mahajan, and Nicolas Morales)
Trade, Protection, and Structural Transformation in the Late 19th Century United States
Pre-PhD Publications
Globalization and the Reach of Multinationals: Implications for Portfolio Exposures, Capital Flows, and Home Bias
(with Carol Bertaut and Stephanie Curcuru)
Journal of Accounting and Finance, 2021
Abstract (click to expand)
The growing use of low-tax jurisdictions as locations for firm headquarters, proliferation of offshore financing vehicles, and growing size, number, and geographic diversity of multinational firms have clouded the view of capital flows and investor exposures from standard sources such as the IMF Balance of Payments and the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey. We use detailed, security-level information on U.S. cross-border portfolio investment to uncover the extent of distortions in the official U.S. statistics. We find that nearly a third of U.S. cross border portfolio investment is allocated to a country different from its primary economic exposure by standard reporting conventions. About one-fourth of the stock of global cross-border portfolio investment is similarly distorted, with exposures to emerging markets likely understated by about a third. Estimates of the international exposures of U.S. investors are even larger when we distribute exposure according to the geographic distributions of firm-level sales. Our results have implications for conclusions we draw about the factors influencing capital flows, in particular those to emerging markets.Globalization and the Geography of Capital Flows
(with Carol Bertaut and Stephanie Curcuru)
FEDS Notes, September 2019