We study how an aggregate bank flow shock impacts German cities' GDP growth depending on the state of their local real estate markets. Identification exploits a policy framework assigning refugees to cities on a quasi-random basis and variation in non-developable area for the construction of a...

Recent research documents a causal impact of place on the long-run outcomes of children. However, little is known about which neighborhood characteristics are most important, and at what scale neighborhood effects operate. By using the random assignment of public housing along with...

The primary purposes of this paper are to (1) consider the justifications that have been offered for housing subsidies to low-income households and the implications of these justifications for the evaluation and design of housing programs, (2) describe the most important features of the largest...

One of the goals of federal housing policy is to improve the prospects of children in poor families. But little research has been conducted into the effects of participation in housing programs on children, perhaps because it is difficult to find data sets with information about both...

We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing policies. We estimate the model using data collected by the New York Housing...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An...

This paper provides new evidence on the long-term impacts of neighborhood environment on low-income credit decisions by analyzing financial outcomes and borrowing decisions of participants of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. The MTO experiment was a unique, large-scale experiment that...

We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to study how the demolition of 160 public housing projects--funded by the HOPE VI program--affected the adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed to...

Researchers and policy-makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic model of optimal location choice, we estimate preferences over neighborhoods of likely...

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) represents a novel tax expenditure program that employs "investable" tax credits to spur production of low-income rental housing. While it has grown into the largest source of new affordable housing in the U.S. and its structure is now being replicated...