The real economic cost of homeownership depends on an intricate system of taxes and subsides that vary over time and across the United States. We incorporate the key features of this system into a framework for measuring the annual user-cost of housing and we use it to document how housing costs...

Commercial real estate accounts for roughly 20% of the U.S. fixed asset stock, and commercial land use is highly regulated. However, little is known about the quantitative impact of these regulations on economic activity or consumer welfare. This paper develops a spatial general equilibrium...

We study how preferences over the demographic composition of co-patrons affects income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish demographic preferences from tastes for other venue attributes, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: preferences for...

Climate change presents new risks for property in the United States. Due to the high cost and sometimes unavailability of location-specific property risk data, home buyers can greatly benefit from acquiring knowledge about these risks. To explore this, a large-scale nationwide natural field...

This chapter examines the role of spatial sorting in shaping economic inequality in the United States. We first document the evolution of firm and worker sorting by skill level between 1980 and 2017. We highlight a shift since 2000, where both high-education workers and firms increasingly sort...

We propose a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous households holding general non-homothetic preferences over tradable goods and housing. In equilibrium, desirable and productive locations command high housing prices. So long as housing is a necessity, these locations are...

We build a model of optimal fixed-rate mortgage refinancing with fixed costs and inattention and derive a new sufficient statistic that can be used to measure inattention frictions from simple moments of the rate gap distribution. In the model, borrowers pay attention to rates sporadically so...

This paper introduces consumption segregation, a new margin of residential segregation, and examines its patterns, causes, and discusses its aggregate consequences. We use new longitudinal and highly granular data to measure consumption segregation in the United States and document that it is...

This study examines the relationship between racial segregation and environmental equity in Pittsburgh from 1910 to 1940. Utilizing newly digitized historical data on the spatial distribution of air pollution in what was likely America's most polluted city, we analyze how racial disparities in...