Working Papers

Rents, Movers, and Stayers: The Spillover Effects of Construction in San Francisco

This paper identifies the causal impact of new construction on nearby rents, outmigration, and inmigration in San Francisco by exploiting random variation in construction location induced by serious building fires. I combine parcel-level data on fires and construction with an original dataset of historic Craigslist rents and individual migration histories that allow me to examine moves at the renter level and demographic change at the parcel level. I find that rents and moves to poorer zipcodes fall differentially near new market rate construction, while inmigration from richer zipcodes increases, and discuss how this relates to concepts of displacement and gentrification. In contrast, affordable housing does not have spillover effects.

Reproductive Policy Shocks and Defensive Investments in Contraception

with Joanna Venator

Do women make defensive investments in contraception when reproductive policy becomes more restrictive? In event studies using Planned Parenthood panel data, we show that realized and anticipated abortion restrictions increase take-up of more effective contraception, while expected reductions in contraceptive insurance coverage increase use of long-lasting methods that protect against future cost increases. We estimate a dynamic model in which women trade off efficacy, cost, and method-specific preferences. Restrictive policies induce women to shift away from preferred methods: eliminating abortion access and contraceptive coverage reduces lifetime utility for 57% of women, while subsidizing abortion and contraception raises utility for 85%.

Towards a Methodology for Measuring Rental Property Ownership in the United States

with Rebecca Diamond, John Eric Humphries, Stephanie Kestelman, and John Voorheis

Roughly one-third of U.S. households rent their homes, yet measuring who owns rental property is difficult: ownership is frequently obscured by LLCs, partnerships, and other intermediary entities that separate legal from economic control. We develop a method that traces ownership through administrative records — combining deeds and property assessments with the Census Bureau's Business Register, IRS Schedule K-1 filings, and SEC filings on REITs — to identify ultimate owners and construct property portfolios across the full landlord size distribution. Applying the method to 11 large CBSAs, we find that individual landlords own a large majority of rental units, though their share varies meaningfully across markets. We also show that the widely used mailing-address aggregation approach both under- and over-states portfolio size in systematic ways. The method is designed to scale to national coverage and to support measurement of landlord identity, portfolio composition, and ownership concentration in U.S. rental markets. We also discuss the method's current limitations and outline directions for refinement and validation.

  • Forthcoming in the NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) volume on Measurement of Housing and the Housing Sector

Poisoned by Policy: The Impact of the Flint Water Crisis on Political Participation

with Eleanor Wiseman

We study changes in voting, new voter registration, and candidate choice in response to a criminal government failure known as the Flint water crisis which exposed one in twelve households in Flint, MI to lead in their tap water.  We compare outcomes for voters who received home lead test results just before versus just after an election.  We find that the crisis, widely understood as the result of institutional racism, caused stark racial divergence in political participation between Black and White voters.  Black voters increased turnout, accelerated registration, and rejected the incumbent, while White voters did not react.

Economic Shocks, Inequality, and Unintended Fertility

with Kelly Jones

On average, fertility is procyclical: women prefer to delay births during financial hardship. However, we show that for a disadvantaged minority of women, shocks increase (unintended) fertility due to reduced access to reproductive controls like contraception and abortion. Combining individual tax returns with natality data from the Social Security Administration, we show that earnings loss during the Great Recession reduced fertility among most income groups but increased fertility among nonfilers, the lowest-income group. We use survey data and a theoretical framework to provide evidence that this heterogeneity is driven by a loss of healthcare access among the lowest-resource women.

Works in progress

Evicted from the Land of Opportunity: Evidence on Displacement from California Rent Control

with Brian Asquith and Charly Porcher

We investigate the socioeconomic impacts of plausibly exogenous eviction from rent-controlled housing in California. Under the Ellis Act, landlords are allowed to evict all tenants from a building and withdraw it from the rental market. We assemble panel data on address histories, employment, income, and neighborhood characteristics for all Ellis-evictees in San Francisco and a control group of non-evictees in the same block. We confirm that those large-building evictions appear orthogonal to evictees’ individual characteristics after controlling for observable household and neighborhood effects. Comparing those two groups with a difference-in-difference approach, we find that evicted tenants between 1998 and 2012 not only exhibit a higher propensity to exit the city but also endure a reduction in nominal income that reaches 20 percent eight years after the eviction, the end of our analysis window. Those income losses are also experienced, in the same magnitude but more gradually, by evictees who remain in San Francisco. Those large income losses contrast with the income improvement we observe for non-eviction-related relocations. The negative impact extends to their residential destinations post-eviction, which tend to be neighborhoods with lower job density, higher unemployment rates, and diminished school quality, particularly for tenants with lower pre-eviction income. Specifically, children from evicted households face significant setbacks, evidenced by diminished earnings in early adulthood, suggesting a persistent intergenerational impact.

Measuring Rental Property Ownership in the United States

with Rebecca Diamond, John Eric Humphries, Stephanie Kestelman, Winnie van Dijk, and John Voorheis

Despite the fact that roughly one-third of U.S. households rent their homes, we know surprisingly little about the individuals and firms that provide rental housing services. A key challenge is the widespread use of limited liability companies (LLCs) and other intermediaries to hold real estate assets, which obscures the link between properties and their ultimate owners. This paper develops a methodology to identify landlord identities and property portfolios in a consistent, scalable manner across much of the United States, providing new insight into the structure of the rental housing supply. We use restricted U.S. Census data to construct new measures of rental housing ownership at the CBSA level. We use these measures to document new facts about the supply side of the rental housing market and to validate commonly used methods for measuring rental property ownership.