Publications:
"Unhoused and Mismeasured: The Accuracy of Surveys of Those Experiencing Homelessness" (with Bruce D. Meyer, Angela Wyse, Alexa Grundwaldt, and Derek Wu), 2025. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 115, 90-95.
Working Papers:
"Inclusionary Zoning and the Supply of Housing: Evidence from Boston" [Job Market Paper, Draft Forthcoming]
Housing affordability has become a pressing challenge across the United States. In response, municipalities have adopted inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to provide a share of units at below-market rents. While these policies create affordable housing, they may discourage overall housing construction. I study this trade-off in Boston, which from 2000 to 2024 required buildings with 10 or more units to set aside 10 to 13 percent of units for income-eligible households. Using a bunching design, I find that almost two-thirds of developments near the threshold are instead built smaller to avoid the policy. As a result, the policy reduces market-rate construction by about 5 units for each marginal affordable unit it produces. Each affordable unit produced near the threshold provides its tenant an estimated rent discount worth $305,000 in present value, while imposing $437,000 in aggregate rent increases on nearby renters. These results illustrate the trade-off between providing discounted units to a small number of households and increasing housing costs for many more.
"The Effect of LIHTC on Housing Markets: Quantities, Prices, and Welfare" (with Fernando Ferreira and Matthew Turner)
We estimate the effect of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) on local housing quantities, rents, and welfare. We develop a simple equilibrium framework that links LIHTC-induced changes in housing supply to crowd-out, affordability, and welfare, allowing us to measure the program’s effects on renters, landlords, developers, and taxpayers within a common structure. Empirically, we compare neighborhoods with approved LIHTC proposals to otherwise similar neighborhoods with rejected proposals, using a newly assembled dataset of nearly 25,000 LIHTC applications matched to HUD, Census, and ACS data. We find that LIHTC awards increase the local multifamily housing stock nearly one-for-one with the number of subsidized units placed in service, implying little if any crowd-out of unsubsidized development. Roughly ten years after project approval, average rents in treated neighborhoods are about 6 percent lower than in comparable control areas, with the largest effects concentrated among units renting near the LIHTC price threshold. Our preferred calculations imply that an average LIHTC award raises consumer surplus by about $47,000 per new unit, transfers about $43,000 per unit from incumbent landlords to renters, and increases developer surplus by about $60,000 per unit. Overall, LIHTC improves affordability largely through market-wide equilibrium effects: most of the gains arise through rent reductions for surrounding renters, not only through the direct allocation of subsidized units. [Draft available upon request]
"Homelessness and the Persistence of Deprivation: Income, Employment, and Safety Net Participation" (with Bruce D. Meyer, Angela Wyse, Alexa Grunwaldt, and Derek Wu)
Homelessness is arguably the most extreme hardship associated with poverty in the United States, yet people experiencing homelessness are excluded from official poverty statistics and much of the extreme poverty literature. This paper provides the most detailed and accurate portrait to date of the level and persistence of material disadvantage faced by this population, including the first national estimates of income, employment, and safety net participation based on administrative data. Starting from the first large and nationally representative sample of adults recorded as sheltered and unsheltered homeless taken from the 2010 Census, we link restricted-use longitudinal tax records and administrative data on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicare, Medicaid, Disability Insurance (DI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), veterans’ benefits, housing assistance, and mortality. Nearly half of these adults had formal employment in the year they were observed as homeless, and nearly all either worked or were reached by at least one safety net program. Nevertheless, their incomes remained low for the decade surrounding an observed period of homelessness, suggesting that homelessness tends to arise in the context of long-term, severe deprivation rather than large and sudden losses of income. People appear to experience homelessness because they are very poor despite being connected to the labor market and safety net, with low permanent incomes leaving them vulnerable to the loss of housing when met with even modest disruptions to life circumstances. [NBER Working Paper No. 32323]
Works in progress:
"Homelessness and Rents" (with Felipe Barbieri and Angela Wyse)
"Hospital Discharge and Long-Term Outcomes Among Homeless Patients" (with Kathleen Galper and Emily Brignone)