Working Papers

Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing (revisions in progress)

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 containing the locations, completion dates, and characteristics of the near-universe of public housing projects 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 neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents, consistent with the program's slum clearance goals and racialized site selection politics. Using matched difference-in-differences designs, I find that public housing construction caused large, persistent increases in Black population shares and substantial declines in median incomes and rents in recipient neighborhoods. Public housing construction also appears to have caused racial transition in surrounding neighborhoods, though these estimates are sensitive to the comparison group. Recipient neighborhoods also exhibited lower rates of upward mobility and higher incarceration rates for low-income children who grew up in these neighborhoods. These findings demonstrate that mid-century public housing, despite intentions of neighborhood revitalization, reinforced existing patterns of racial and economic segregation.

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 (revisions in progress; draft available upon request)

Abstract (click to expand)This paper studies how New York's 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) affected housing quality and investment.

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

Abstract (click to expand)This paper documents how residence-based portfolio statistics increasingly misrepresent true economic exposures in global capital markets due to the growing role of multinational firms, offshore financial centers, and investment funds. Using security-level data from the U.S. Treasury International Capital system, we reallocate U.S. cross-border portfolio holdings from a legal-residence basis to a nationality (economic exposure) basis. We show that nearly 30% of U.S. foreign portfolio investments are misclassified under standard statistics, with major implications for understanding U.S. exposures to emerging markets, interpreting capital flow volatility, and assessing the effectiveness of capital controls. Our findings suggest that traditional balance-of-payments metrics significantly understate the true global financial linkages between countries.