ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
Global Capital and Local Assets: House Prices, Quantities, and Elasticities (with Benjamin Keys). June, 2025. Accepted, Review of Financial Studies.
Find our local house price elasticities and associated standard errors here
Media Coverage: Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today
How Regressive Are Mobility-Related User Fees and Gasoline Taxes? (with Ed Glaeser and Jim Poterba), NBER Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 37, August 2023.
NBER WP 30746
JUE Insight: How much does COVID-19 increase with mobility? Evidence from New York and four other U.S. cities (With Edward L. Glaeser and Stephen J. Redding), Journal of Urban Economics, 127, February 2022.
NBER WP 27519, CEPR DP15050
A brief slide deck is available here
Media Coverage: The New York Times
Working Papers
Ridesharing and the Redistribution of Economic Activity, July 2024. Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Urban Economics.
Awards: UEA Best PhD Paper (Honorable Mention), 2019; EMUEA Kraks Fond Prize (Runner Up), 2019; OSU PhD Conference on Real Estate and Housing (Best Paper Award), 2019.
This paper studies how improvements in local accessibility influence cities’ distributions of nontradeable amenities, housing costs and welfare. I build a model of local demand for these amenities, which depends on travel times and costs. Ridesharing’s entry shocks these times and costs. Three years after entry, amenities grow faster in areas which are driving-accessible and transit-inaccessible. In these locations, median house prices and rents rise by 3% and 1% per year, respectively. Taken together, the improvements in amenities and access outpace the rising housing costs. All residents benefit from ridesharing, although homeowners’ benefits are four times larger than renters’.
The Financial Consequences of Wanting to Own a Home (with Gregor Schubert) February 2025.
Selected Presentations: Pre-WFA Summer Real Estate Research Symposium 2023, NBER SI 2023 (Real Estate); BFI Women in Empirical Micro; Utah Eccles Housing Affordability Summit, Online Spatial and Urban Seminar 2025S
We study the causal effects of homeownership affinities on tenure choice, household sensitivity to credit shocks, and retirement portfolios. Exploiting exogenous variation in affinities across U.S. immigrants’ countries of origin, we find that a 10pp higher affinity causes a 1.5pp higher homeownership rate in the U.S. Using exogenous credit-supply shocks, we show that high-affinity households are more responsive to credit availability, and less likely to default on mortgage payments. By retirement, high-affinity households realize higher homeownership, greater total wealth, and larger real estate shares in their portfolios. These effects are largely driven by appreciation.
The Impact of Institutional Investors on Housing Markets (with Franklin Qian and Zipei Zhu) October 2025.
Selected Presentations: Toronto (Rotman) 2025, Cavalcade 2025, Baruch College (Zicklin), Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (scheduled), CU Boulder (Leeds), 2024 Stanford SITE for Housing and Urban Economics, Cornell Real Estate Symposium, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2024 Pre-WFA Summer Real Estate Research Symposium, 2nd Annual Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality, CICF 2024, ITAM Finance Conference 2024, RERI Annual Conference 2024
Since the Great Recession, single-family rental and private-equity investors have transformed U.S. housing markets. Using housing deeds from 2010–2022, we show that these investors grew rapidly and clustered geographically. Exploiting variation from the pre-existing built environment and falling management costs, we instrument for their market share. A one-standard-deviation (average) increase in local shares raises prices by 1.05 (0.21) p.p. and rents by 1.68 (0.43) p.p. These averages conceal temporal heterogeneity: prices and rents fell pre- pandemic but rose amid the scramble for space. As investor expansion displaced owners, rents and prices declined, suggesting lower homeowner amenities.
Other Publications
Understanding the Ballot Question That Could Reshape Rideshare and Gig Driving, with Evan Horowitz. Center for State Policy Analysis, Tisch College, Tufts University, 2022.
Your Uber Has Arrived: How Ridesharing Expands Access, Increases Emissions, and Changes Cities. Kleinman Center for Energy Policy Digest, 2019.
Underwater and Drowning? Some Facts about Mortgages that Could Be Targeted by Eminent Domain, with Andreas Fuster. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics, 2013.