This paper was previously circulated under Public Housing Preferences and Welfare in New York City 1930-2010.

This paper studies the long-run effects of public housing construction on neighborhood composition and housing markets in New York City from 1930 to 2010. Using newly assembled archival data linked to census tract information, I track racial population changes separately for public and private residents, allowing me to isolate behavioral sorting from mechanical placement. Employing a difference-in-differences shows that projects built before 1970 triggered persistent market responses: private White and Black populations declined by 88% and 76%, while rents fell by up to 43%, consistent with declining neighborhood demand. In contrast, post-1970 projects—built under different policy regimes—had muted effects, driven largely by the direct placement of public housing tenants. To quantify preferences over public housing design, I use a discrete choice model of location to map reduced-form coefficients into marginal willingness to pay estimates. The results show that taller buildings depress demand, higher construction quality increases it, and resident composition shapes preferences in racially patterned ways. These results highlight a trade-off for policymakers: expanding affordable housing in high-opportunity areas requires balancing scale with quality to mitigate adverse market responses.

Presented at: UEA European Meeting (2024), Lisbon Urban and Public Economics Workshop (2025), EEA-ESEM (2025).

This paper examines the impact of early 20th-century rent control laws in New York City, exploiting judicial discretion as a source of variation. The 1920 regulations empowered municipal court judges to decide whether rent increases were "reasonable," with rulings shaped by partisan affiliation. We assemble a new dataset of over 20,000 rental listings from the New York Times (1918–1930) and more than 7,000 archival building permits, linked to records on 125 district judges. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design at municipal court district boundaries, we find that market rents rose by nearly 10% when crossing from Democrat- to Republican-controlled districts after rent control. To study supply effects, we implement a difference-in-differences analysis and show that residential investment was 65–85% higher in landlord-friendly districts. Together, these findings demonstrate how judicial discretion shaped both prices and investment, leading to systematic differences in profits and construction activity across districts with varying judicial composition.

Presented at: UEA European Meeting (2025), AREUEA International (2025), 4th Zurich Workshop on Residential Housing Markets (2025).

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.