Research

This paper investigates the long-run effect of public housing project design on neighborhood composition and rental prices in New York City from 1930 to 2010. Using a newly assembled dataset on the US census tract level and leveraging the staggered rollout of public housing, I document sizeable effects on racial composition. White population declined in tracts with public housing projects with significant spillover effects to adjacent tracts, while black population increased but only in public housing tracts. The effects on white and black population are driven by a specific project type called the “Tower in the park” – slim brick high-rises and vast green spaces in between. Falling rent prices around “Towers” indicate negative demand effects. In a cross-sectional analysis, I find that “Towers in the Park” are more associated with higher incarceration rates than non-towers, though incarceration rates cannot entirely explain spillover effects on white population. Finally, I evaluate the welfare consequences of these externalities using a static neighborhood choice model. The model demonstrates that removing public housing can increase amenity values and improve welfare. I find that these welfare gains can be explained by “Tower in the park” demolitions. This suggests that building design can mitigate negative externalities of public housing.

This paper examines the impact of early 20th-century rent control laws in New York City (NYC), using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to analyze the effects on market rents near municipal court district boundaries. We focus on rent regulations introduced in 1920, where judges had discretion to determine rent increases and did so influenced by their partisan affiliations. Using a dataset of over 12,000 rental listings from the New York Times and records of 125 district judges, we find that market rents jumped by almost 10% crossing from Democrat- to Republican-controlled districts after the policy was implemented. A causal interpretation is supported not only by a rich set of controls but also by the lack of any discontinuity just before these controls were introduced or after. Our findings contribute new evidence on judicial discretion's role in shaping housing market outcomes and provide insights into early rent control policies, highlighting their distortionary effects on rental markets before World War II.

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This article examines the responsiveness of new housing supply to prices and costs, using the case of Ireland at quarterly frequency from the 1970s, as well as a county-level panel from the 1990s. Across four error-correction specifications, and supported by an instrumental variables approach, we find the estimated elasticity of new housing supply to prices of +0.9 in the baseline, while that of costs is larger in magnitude (−1.9). We present evidence that responsiveness to prices rose after the 1980s, then fell in the 2000s, before rising again and also that elasticities vary at the county level.

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