Essays in the economics of housing and labor markets

The first chapter is joint with Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade. We investigate the consequences of the 1994 rent-control expansion in San Francisco on tenants, landlords, and equilibrium outcomes in the rental market. Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mobility by 20\% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15\% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply drove up market rents in the long run by 5.1\%, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. Using a dynamic, neighborhood choice model, we find rent control offered large benefits to covered tenants. Welfare losses from decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against rent increases were provided as government social insurance, instead of a regulated landlord mandate. The second chapter consists of my job-market paper, joint with Rose Tan. We investigate the consequences of high-skilled firm entry on nearby affected neighborhoods and incumbent residents living in those neighborhoods. To study this, we construct a dataset of 391 such entries in the U.S. from 1990--2010. We follow incumbent residents over 13 years using rich micro-data on individual address histories, property characteristics, and financial records. First, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents' consumption, finances, and mobility. To do so, we compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away, while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites. Next, we decompose welfare from changes in wages, rents, and amenities for incumbent residents using a model of individual home and work location choice. Taken together, our results show high-skilled incumbents, especially homeowners, benefit. Low-skilled owners benefit less than high-skilled owners. Low-skilled renters are harmed. In the medium to long run, they incur an annual welfare loss that is equivalent to a 0.2 percent decline in their wages one year prior to the entry. While the typical high-skilled firm entry has moderate welfare consequences on a per capita basis, the negative welfare consequences for low-skilled renters could be large for some more extreme firm entries. Housing assistance in the form of affordable housing and rental insurance, as well as property tax scheme could be used to mitigate the negative distributional consequences of high-skilled firm entries. The third chapter is joint with Haaris Mateen and Ye Zhang. We study the microstructure of the U.S. housing market using a novel data set comprising housing search and bargaining behavior for millions of interactions between sellers and buyers. We first establish a number of stylized facts, the most prominent being a nearly 50--50 split between houses that sold below final listing price and those that sold above final listing price. Second, we compare observed behavior with predictions from a large theoretical housing literature. Many predictions on the relationship between sales price, time on the market, listing price and atypicality are borne out in the data. However, existing models do not adequately explain the spread of the sales price around the final listing price. Using a modeling strategy that treats listing price changes as revisions of expectations about the sales price, we find sellers under-react to information shocks in estimating the sales price. Last, we find that the bargaining outcomes are influenced by previously undocumented buyers' bid characteristics, e.g., financing contingencies and escalation clauses, that signal a buyer's ability to complete or expedite the transaction. This suggests an important role for buyer bid characteristics, which are not explained by existing theories, in affecting bargaining power and surplus allocation in bilateral bargaining in housing transactions

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Diamond Rebecca (Of Stanford University. Graduate School of Business)
Einav Liran
Gentzkow Matthew