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

This paper studies how public housing reshaped neighborhoods and private housing markets. I link archival NYCHA records to decennial Census data from 1930 to 2010 and 19,463 geocoded New York Times rental listings. To estimate these effects, I use a stacked event study design that compares 166 New York City census tracts first treated before 1970 with slightly more distant tracts that were never treated. Public housing raised total population and housing, but these gains masked a persistent contraction of the private market. Six decades after com- pletion, treated tracts had about 960 fewer privately housed residents and roughly 720 fewer private units. Growth in total Black and Hispanic populations largely reflected public-housing occupancy rather than private-market inflows. Median asking rents per room were roughly 50 percent lower in the long run, and Census contract rents fell by about 40 percent. The joint de- cline in private quantities and rents suggests that public housing reduced neighborhood demand rather than simply removing private housing supply. I then use a location-choice framework to recover rent-equivalent valuations of public-housing attributes. Greater construction investment is associated with smaller private-market discounts, while taller buildings are associated with larger discounts. The results highlight a central trade-off in affordable-housing design between project scale and construction quality.

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 percent when crossing from Democrat- to Republican-controlled districts after rent control. We examine supply effects using a difference-in-differences design. We show that judicially enforced rent control substantially reduced residential investment: total residential investment was about 76 percent higher in landlord-friendly districts during the rent-control period. Together, these findings demonstrate how judicial discretion shaped both prices and investment, leading to systematic differences in profits and construction activity across districts, which likely shaped the medium-run built environment.

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.

We study the consequences of expiring social housing contracts on neighborhood dynamics in Berlin. When affordability covenants expire, subsidized units return to the private market, potentially altering local housing market dynamics through higher prices, increased mobility, and changes in neighborhood composition. We exploit the staggered, contract-length-driven roll-off of Germany's Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) programme between 2010 and 2020 to quantify the effects of these expirations. Using high-resolution administrative data and a difference-in-differences event-study design that accounts for heterogeneous treatment timing, we show that the average loss of 43 regulated dwellings per tract increases advertised rents by 4-5%, triggers additional renovation activity, and induces selective in-migration of higher-income, lower-risk, and more ethnically native residents. These results highlight how the structure and duration of housing subsidies shape long-run affordability, gentrification, and urban inequality.

Presented at: UEA European Meeting (2026), University of Essex (2025), RWI Seminar (2025), IAB 2nd Workshop on Urban Labor Markets and Local Income Inequality (2025).

Global concerns over affordability and accessibility ofthe city have led to rapid expansions of social housing in European countries. While social housing can enable access to the city for a given individual, it risks creating negative externalities via the labor market. In this paper, we study how social housing affects effective labor supply and wages within a spatial general equilibrium model. Using extensive administrative data on the Netherlands, we find that low-skilled workers are more productive in cities, but this is not reflected in earnings because of the labor supply distortions introduced by social housing in spatial equilibrium.

Presented at: UEA European Meeting (2026) .