A key reason for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During Covid, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. We document how cities changed during Covid and consider how the persistence of...

When the fraction of minorities in a neighborhood exceeds the tipping point white flight accelerates. I develop a revealed-preference method to estimate the tipping points of 38,000 census tracts and the preferences of households for minority neighbors in the 123 Metropolitan Statistical Areas...

This paper shows the endogeneity of amenities plays a crucial role in determining the welfare distribution of a city's residents. We quantify this mechanism by building a dynamic model of residential choice with heterogeneous households, where consumption amenities are the equilibrium outcome of...

Our understanding of individuals' response to information about unregulated contaminants is limited. We leverage the highly publicized social discovery of unregulated PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) contamination in public drinking water to study the impact of information about...

The conversion of brown office buildings to green apartments can contribute towards a solution to three pressing issues: oversupply of office in a hybrid-and-remote-work world, shortage of housing, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. We propose a set of criteria to identify commercial office...

This paper examines how homeownership status shapes attention to inflation and its impact on durable consumption. Using randomized controlled trials on U.S. households (2021-2023), we document systematic heterogeneity in responses to inflation-related information. Homeowners exhibit greater...

The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply-shaped by factors like geography and regulation-strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income...

This paper leverages the universe of U.S. tax data and state lottery wins between 2000 and 2019 to estimate the causal effect of financial resources on three key lifecycle outcomes for young adults. We find large and persistent effects on homeownership, with a response function that exhibits...

While rising house prices benefit existing homeowners, we document a new channel through which price shocks have intergenerational wealth effects. Using panel data from school zones within a large U.S. school district, we find that higher local house prices lead to improvements in local school...

Income and home ownership both surged in the United States between 1940 and 1960. We use cross-place variation in changes in real income to assess the importance of income gains to the mid-century home ownership boom. OLS and IV estimates suggest that a large share of the overall increase in...