Essays in Urban and Public Economics

My research agenda is motivated by a desire to better understand the causes and consequences of geographic inequality in the U.S. today. Using the models and methods from urban, real estate, and public economics, my dissertation examines how land use, local public finance, and place-based policies might alleviate or exacerbate existing economic disparities.

My first dissertation paper, “Reclaiming Local Control: School Finance Reforms and Housing Supply Restrictions,” studies the relationships between property taxation, school quality, and housing policy. I propose and examine a new causal channel behind the rise of housing supply restrictions: loss of control over property taxation as a means to fund public goods. Exploiting California's mid-1970s landmark school finance equalization as a natural experiment, I show school districts with larger exclusionary motives—those that benefited most from local control of education funding—enacted more stringent land use controls, built less housing, and experienced greater house price appreciation after losing local fiscal autonomy.

In a second paper, “Persistence of Prejudice: Estimating the Long Term Effects of Redlining,” I investigate the long-run effects of institutionalized historical mortgage lending discrimination, or “redlining.” This now-illegal practice is often held up as the key contributor to both the Black-white racial wealth and homeownership gaps and decades of neighborhood disinvestment and urban decline. Using recently digitized credit-worthiness maps, I document that neighborhoods with Black residents were disproportionately assigned the most-restrictive credit rating. Comparing credit-restricted redlined census tracts to adjacent tracts, I estimate redlining was associated with large differential declines in housing supply and population density. After discriminatory lending was outlawed during the mid-1970s, I find moderate improvement in homeownership rates and racial segregation. However, housing supply and population density remain persistently lower in formerly credit-restricted census tracts relative to their credit-favored neighbors.

Moving from history to the present, my co-authored work with Wharton Professor Joseph Gyourko, “The Local Residential Land Use Regulatory Environment across U.S. Housing Markets: Evidence from a New Wharton Index,” published in the Journal of Urban Economics, reports results from a new survey on land use regulations for nearly 2,500 communities across the United States. We compare these data to a previous survey (Gyourko, Saiz, Summers, 2008) and detail how land use policies, processes, and practices have changed in over 800 communities. This represents the first consistent nationwide data documenting changes in residential land use regulation at the local jurisdictional level.

Return to Table of Contents