Research

Job Market Paper

The First Era of American Federal Public Housing (1940-1960) — Effects on Neighborhoods

This paper examines how early American public housing affected the income and demographic composition of targeted neighborhoods. At its outset in the mid-1930s and roughly until 1960, public housing combined two missions: provide “decent” housing to working-poor families, and help cities curb urban decay through slum clearance. It was the first nationwide attempt to rely on housing policy to limit the extent of urban poverty concentration. To investigate its effects on neighborhoods, I construct a novel data set with development locations and construction dates in 44 cities. Using a shift-share-style instrument framework, I instrument for local public housing construction by exploiting exogenous aggregate fluctuations in the number of federally funded public housing units across regions and over time, interacted with a neighborhood’s likelihood of receiving public housing conditional on its conditional on its start-of-period characteristics. I find that in neighborhoods most likely to be targeted by the policy, public housing construction increased the shares of families in the lower half of the income distribution, with deciles 3 to 5 increasing by 5 to 6 percentage points each. The bottom decile share declined by about 7 percentage points, although this estimate is not statistically significant. I also show that the average family income below the city median increased by about 20 percent in typical recipient neighborhoods. Together, these effects indicate that public housing reduced the concentration of families in the lowest decile by drawing in families with slightly higher incomes. Put differently, targeted neighborhoods became “mixed-income” areas, which differs considerably from the high levels of poverty concentration that were downstream of changes in public housing policy beginning in the 1960s. These results underscore the way housing policy shapes neighborhood residential composition and income segregation. [pdf]

Work in Progress

Homeownership Dynamics and the Lock-In Effect — Evidence from the Federal Reserve’s Monetary Policy Tightening

With Amine Ouazad, Romain Rancière and Qitong Wang

We examine how search frictions and increasing mortgage interest rates interact to shape housing market dynamics, particularly through the ‘lock-in’ effect of fixed-rate mortgages. We develop and numerically solve a dynamic search and matching model that accounts for three key features of housing markets: (1) the dual buyer-seller role of most market participants, (2) costly housing search, and (3) widespread use of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages in the US. Using transaction-level data from Los Angeles and San Francisco to discipline the model, we aim to shed light on how high interest rates affect housing prices and their dispersion.

Human Capital Formation and Neighborhood Spillovers

With Gautier Lenfant

We examine how early public housing affected the long-term labor market and wealth outcomes of individuals who lived near these developments as children. Building on findings from my job market paper showing that public housing created mixed-income neighborhoods in this period, we exploit variation in exposure to public housing construction to study neighborhood effects on childhood development. While existing literature documents benefits when children move from distressed to higher-income areas, our study examines a reversed policy experiment where relatively higher-income families moved into lower-income neighborhoods. We combine longitudinal PSID data with full-count 1940 Census records to track outcomes across individuals’ life cycles, using both exposure duration and regional variation in construction as sources of identification.

Older Work

Aggregate Housing Price Trends in Chicago and local characteristics, ENSAE Master’s thesis [pdf]