For decades U.S. housing policy has focused on promoting homeownership. In this study, I show that the set of policies designed to further homeownership has been ineffective and expensive and that homeownership as a public policy goal is not well supported. I document that homeownership rates...

Federal housing policy promotes homeownership by subsidizing mortgage debt for many households with few assets and low credit scores. In this paper, we exploit the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA's) surprise 50 basis point cut to its annual mortgage insurance premium in January 2015 to...

In many recent location choice models, households randomly vary with respect to their utility of living in a location. We demonstrate that the distribution generating this randomness is fundamentally not identifiable from location choice data and as a result the optimal allocation as chosen by a...

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population...