Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control affects housing production by exploiting a common electoral...

I estimate the impact of new housing supply on the local rent distribution, exploiting delays in housing completions caused by weather shocks during the construction phase. Increasing the flow of new supply by 1 percent lowers average rents by 0.2 percent, and increases disproportionately the...

What stirs most people against rent control laws in the United States and elsewhere are stories of people who have held apartments for many years and now pay absurdly low rents for them. There are important reasons for removing rent controls, but the shock value of a low rent is not one of...

We consider a model of 'tenancy rent control' where landlords are not allowed to raise the rent on sitting tenants nor to evict them, though they are free to set the nominal rent when taking on a new tenant. If there is any inflation in the economy, landlords prefer to take short-staying...

This paper shows that the capitalization of local amenities is effectively priced into land via a two-part pricing formula: a \ticket" price paid regardless of the amount of housing service consumed and a \slope" price paid per unit of services. We first show theoretically how tickets arise as...