Below are some of the research papers I have written. You can also read my research statement here.
Housing Sales and Construction Responses to COVID-19 : Evidence from Shelter-in-Place and Eviction Moratoria in the U.S. Job Market Paper, Working Paper Abstract: The goal of this paper is to analyze the county-level impact of public policies related to COVID-19 on the housing market in U.S. Aimed at reducing the spread of the virus, different states throughout the U.S. enacted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as shelter-in-place and eviction moratoria, in different months and for varied stretches throughout 2020 and 2021. Shelter-in-place orders could potentially limit the ability of home-buyers and sellers to interact as well as they could pre-COVID, introducing frictions in the process of selling houses. Prolonged and over-lapping eviction moratoria could dampen the construction of multi-family units and encourage the landlords to sell rented-out apartments. This paper attempts to investigate if and how these interventions causally impacted the county-level housing sales and building permits approval in the U.S. The paper estimates the average treatment effect of these orders using a traditional generalized difference-in-difference estimator and a more recent variation of the estimator that is more suited multiple treatment groups with staggered treatment introductions and withdrawals. The results show that shelter-in-place is associated with significantly smaller year-on-year changes in sales of single-family houses, condominiums and the collection of all residences. Selective moratoria on eviction hearings and judgements are also found to be associated with smaller year-on-year changes in multi-family building permit approvals.
Intercity Impacts of Work-from-Home with Both Remote and Non-Remote Workers with Jan K. Brueckner, Published at Journal of Housing Economics: COVID-19 and Housing Market special issue
Abstract: This paper summarizes the results from generalizing the simple two-city WFH model of Brueckner, Kahn and Lin (2021) through the addition of a group of non-remote workers, who must live in the city where they work. The results show that the main qualitative conclusions of BKL regarding the intercity effects of WFH are unaffected by this modification, with WFH yielding the same aggregate population and employment changes in the two cities and the same house-price and wage effects as in the simpler model. This conclusion is useful because it establishes the robustness of BKL’s highly parsimonious model.
The Intercity Impacts of Work-from-Home in a Spatial Hedonic Model with Remote and Non-Remote Workers
Abstract: This paper formulates a spatial hedonic equilibrium model that shows inter-city impacts of the introduction of work-from-home. Following Brueckner, Kahn and Lin (2021), the paper attempts to theoretically study how the introduction of work-from-home, which allows workers to relocate across cities while keeping their original jobs, impacts housing prices, population and employment levels. Extending Brueckner et al. (2021), the current paper divides the workforce into two types of workers, remote and non-remote, to allow for a more realistic work-from-home model. Additionally, the model uses explicit functional forms for production and utility, resulting in closed-form equilibrium solutions conditional on the extent of productivity advantages, amenity advantages, and degree of complementarity between worker types. The current paper aims to examine whether the main results in Brueckner et al. (2021) still hold in the modified model.
Socio-Demographic Factors Correlating with Police-Involved Deaths: City-level Evidence from the US
Abstract: Officer-involved deaths have been affecting the United States increasingly over the past half century, to the point where they have defined the course one of the largest social movements of the current era. Although many attempts have been and are being made at delineating patterns, trends and causes of police-involved deaths, a dearth of accurately defined and documented incidents of these fatalities has long impeded research in this area. The current paper aims to answer if and how community characteristics at a city level correlate to fatal police encounters over the period 2000-2010. Panel and cumulative datasets on police-involved deaths from FatalEncounters.org, along with a relevant set of socio-demographic controls, are used in a negative binomial regression model to find factors that might affect the count of officer-involved deaths that occurred in a city. It is found that, for the longitudinal panel data, the Black/African-American population and the Hispanic/Latino population in a city along with police employment, the level of crime and median income constitute significant determinants of officer-involved deaths. In the cumulative (cross-section data only) counterpart, the same factors are significant determinants of deaths.