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 policies which restrict abortion access impact contraceptive choices? We use Planned Parenthood data in a difference-in-difference design to show that both realized and expected restrictions increase take-up of more effective contraception. We then estimate a dynamic model of contraceptive choice in which women trade off efficacy against monetary costs and preferences for method attributes. Restrictive policies induce women to upweight efficacy relative to other characteristics. Eliminating abortion access and insurance coverage for contraception reduces realized lifetime utility for 57% of women with an average loss of $2,080, while providing free abortion and contraception increases utility for 85% of women.

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.