The main focus of this paper is on the process and progress of economic reform in Russia. But I start with four historical questions that bear on the current situation. How advanced was Russia in 1913? What relevance, if any, does the New Economic Policy of the 19205, or NEP, have for the...

We provide evidence of intensified discriminatory behavior by landlords in the rental housing market during the eviction moratoria instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected from an experiment that involved more than 25,000 inquiries of landlords in the 50 largest cities in...

Rental adjustment equations have been estimated for a quarter century. In the U.S., models have used the deviation of the actual vacancy rate from the natural rate as the main explanatory variable, while in the UK, drivers of the demand for space have dominated the estimation. The recent papers...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on price stickiness by documenting a high rate of nominal rigidity among apartment rents in the U.S. between 1974-1981. 29 percent of units had no change in nominal rent from year to year. Nominal rigidity was much higher among units whose...

When there are binding price controls, there are shortages and the allocation of goods across consumers may not be efficient. In general, the misallocation costs of price controls are first order, while the classic welfare losses due to undersupply are second order. This paper presents an...

Real estate markets are periodically plagued by excess supply, rent concessions and few arms-length transactions. During such periods, valuation is problematic. The model presented here requires the forecasts of future vacancy rates, and equilibrium and actual rental rates. Vacancy rate...

Simonsohn and Loewenstein (SL 2006) present evidence that a household moving from one US city to another tends to pay a rent level that is closer to the city of origin, relative to comparable locals. Building on "Memory, Attention, and Choice" (BGS 2019), we show that these effects emerge from...

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...

Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by research showing strong associations between being evicted and subsequent adverse economic outcomes....

Growth has fallen in the U.S., while firm concentration and profits have risen. Meanwhile, labor's share of national income is down, mostly due to the rising market share of low labor share firms. We propose a theory for these trends in which the driving force is falling firm-level costs of...