This paper was previously circulated under Public housing design, racial sorting and welfare: Evidence from New York City public housing 1930-2010.

This paper estimates the long-run effects of public housing on neighborhood composition and welfare in New York City from 1930 to 2010. At its inception in the 1930s, public housing was designed to revitalize slums and provide housing for working-class families. These projects received substantial public support and were desired by both White and Black households. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that projects built before 1960 led White populations declining by up to 46% over 60 years while Black populations surged by 318%. Nearby areas saw a 17% decline in Whites and a 17% increase in Blacks. Post-1960 projects had minimal effects. Linking reduced-form results to a location choice model, I recover household preferences and show that high-rise developments with wide open space in between are less desirable, while low-rise, compact projects increase demand. Welfare estimates show diverging trends by race. I find that welfare gains for White population turned negative from $109.68 in 1950 to -$372.8 in 2010, gains for Black households remained at $1281 per year. These findings highlight how public housing evolved from a broadly supported urban renewal tool to a policy with racially divergent welfare effects and lasting implications for neighborhood sorting.

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.

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.