These are some interesting studies I’ve come across covering housing or housing-related topics. I’ll keep updating this list.

  • Global Economic Development and Land Savings (Nov 2023)

    “Quantification using a canonical urban model suggests that the technology to build tall generates a potential global welfare gain of 4.8%, of which only about one-quarter has been realized. Estimated welfare gains from relaxing existing height constraints are 5.9% in the developed world 3.1% in developing economies.”
  • Buy-to-Live vs. Buy-to-Let: The Impact of Real Estate Investors on Housing Costs and Neighborhoods (Jun 2023)

    “The [Dutch legal ban on buy-to-let investments] effectively reduced investor purchases and increased the share of first-time homebuyers, but did not have a discernible impact on house prices or the likelihood of property sales. The ban did increase rental prices, consistent with reduced rental housing supply”
  • Urban Policy and Spatial Exposure to Environmental Risk (Jan 2023)

    “I find that land-use regulations raise city-level rents by an average 28% and explain 7% of the residents living in fire-prone areas.”
  • Place-Based Productivity and Costs in Science (Sep 2022)

    “Adding more scientists to a city increases both productivity and production costs, but the rise in productivity is larger than the rise in production costs.”
  • The Impact of Upzoning On Housing Construction in Auckland (May 2022)

    “We find strong evidence that upzoning stimulated construction.”
  • Robbing Peter to Pay Paul? The Redistribution of Wealth Caused by Rent Control (Mar 2022)

    “…we find that the tenants who gained the most from rent control had higher incomes and were more likely to be white, while the owners who lost the most had lower incomes and were more likely to be minorities.”
  • The Effect of Short-Term Rentals on Residential Investment (Sep 2021)

    “…we show that residential permits decline discontinuously across jurisdictional boundaries in which one side of the boundary has a STR regulation and the other side does not. The effect is especially pronounced for accessory dwelling units, which decline by 16.5% across regulatory boundaries.”
  • City-wide Effects of New Housing Supply: Evidence from moving chains (Aug 2021)

    “The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run. Market-rate supply is likely to improve affordability outside the sub-markets where new construction occurs and to benefit low-income people.”
  • Warding Off Development Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs (July 2020)

    “…my findings support conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence of NIMBYism, as this example of increased local control reduces permits for local housing by over 20 percent. This suggests that policies that aim to reduce local control to spur housing production may be effective.”
  • Geographic and Temporal Variation in Housing Filtering Rates (Apr 2020)

    “While at a national level filtering is an important long-term source of lower-income housing, this research shows that there is a wide range of filtering rates both across and within metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for owner-occupied properties. Notably, in some markets, properties “filter up” to higher-income households.”
  • Supply Shock Versus Demand Shock: The Local Effects of New Housing in Low-Income Areas (Dec 2019)

    “New buildings decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent relative to locations slightly farther away or developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. Results are driven by a large supply effect–we show that new buildings absorb many high-income households–that overwhelms any offsetting endogenous amenity effect. … Contrary to common concerns, new buildings slow local rent increases rather than initiate or accelerate them.”
  • The Local Residential Land Use Regulatory Environment Across U.S. Housing Markets: Evidence from a New Wharton Index (Dec 2019)

    “The most highly regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas being the most highly regulated according to our metric. … Moreover, regulation in most large coastal markets increased over time.”
  • Ignorance Is Bliss? Rent Regulation, Policy Awareness, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from New York City (Nov 2019)

    “I find that rent-stabilized tenants are more likely to be unemployed compared with tenants in private market-rate units, particularly among white and high-skilled tenants. … The impact of rent stabilization on unemployment only exists among tenants who are aware of their regulation status.”
  • Rent control, market segmentation, and misallocation: Causal evidence from a large-scale policy intervention (Nov 2019)

    “We find a robust positive effect on free-market rents in response to the introduction of rent control. Further, we document that rent control reduced the propensity to move house within rent controlled areas, but only among high income households.”
  • Zoning and the Cost of Housing: Evidence from Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin (Oct 2019)

    “Municipal zoning, shockingly, may be the most consequential regulatory program in the United States. …

    The final parts of the article are more overtly normative. They present the case fo boosting permitted residential densities in urban areas of the United States. To counter neighborhood NIMBYism, state legislatures should either preempt local discretion over what can be built, or reward localities that allow denser housing.”
  • Do New Housing Units in Your Backyard Raise Your Rents? (Oct 2019)

    “I provide event study evidence that for every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease 1% and sales prices also decrease within 500 feet. In addition, I show that new high-rises attract new restaurants, which is consistent with the hypothesis about amenity effects. However, I find that the supply effect is larger, causing net reductions in the rents and sales prices of nearby residential properties.”
  • The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco (Sep 2019)

    “Leveraging new data tracking individual’s migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent 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 likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.”
  • Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates (Jan 2018)

    “We find a significant negative relationship between land use restrictions and fertility rates across all measures and geographies. Specifically, we find that land use regulations reduce fertility rates for teens and women in their twenties while increasing the fertility rate for women in their thirties or older to a lesser degree.”
  • Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation (May 2017)

    “Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity. … we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009.”
  • The Impact of Land Use Regulation on Racial Segregation: Evidence from Massachusetts Zoning Borders (Nov 2013)

    “…over half of the difference between levels of segregation in the stringently zoned Boston and lightly zoned Houston metro areas can be explained by zoning regulation alone.”