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Research
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Working Paper 24-01: Capitalization of Property Tax Incentives: Evidence From Philadelphia
In 2000, Philadelphia enacted an abatement policy that exempted new development from property taxes for 10 years. This policy provides an ideal natural experiment to test property tax capitalization because it creates contemporaneous intra-jurisdiction tax variation within a finite and known...
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Working Paper 23-07: Mortgage Debt and the Consumption Response to Fiscal Transfers
This paper studies how mortgage debt shapes the consumption response to cash transfers using an incomplete markets model with housing and long-term debt. Among homeowners, the model predicts those with mortgage debt have an average spending response six times larger than those without debt, and...
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Working Paper 23-06: Valuing Public Transit: The L-Train Shutdown
In this paper, I quantify the value of access to public transit in New York using the surprise, hurricane-related announcement of the temporary shutdown of an important piece of transportation infrastructure: the L-train connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan. My approach allows me to measure changes in...
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Working Paper 23-05: When Climate Meets Real Estate: A Survey of the Literature
With near unanimity, climate scientists project natural disasters to increase in frequency, severity, and geographic scope over the next century. We survey academic literature at the intersection of these climate risks and real estate. Our review of physical risks includes price, loan performance...
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Working Paper 23-04: How Do Students Value an Elite Education? Evidence on Residential Location and Applications to NYC Specialized Schools
Are students willing to endure long commutes for access to good schools? Using New York City Department of Education administrative data matched with Google transit directions, we find that longer commutes from home markedly deter students from applying to even the most elite high schools. For the...
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Working Paper 23-03: The Credit Supply Channel of Monetary Policy Tightening and its Distributional Impacts
This paper studies how tightening monetary policy transmits to the economy through the mortgage market and sheds new light on the distributional consequences at both individual and regional levels. We find that credit supply factors, specifically restrictions on the debt-to-income (DTI) ratio...
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Working Paper 23-02: Geographic Disaggregation of House Price Stress Paths: Implications for Single-Family Credit Risk Measurement
We explore the impact of geographic disaggregation of house price stress paths on single-family credit risk measurement. Specifically, we focus on the value added of moving from national, to state-level, to core-based statistical area (CBSA)-level house price paths on estimates of mortgage credit...
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Working Paper 23-01: The Value of Intermediaries for GSE Loans
We analyze the costs and benefits of financial intermediaries on access to credit using confidential regulatory data on mortgages securitized by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). We find evidence of lenders pricing for observable and unobservable default risk independently from the GSEs...
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Working Paper 22-04: Effects of Mortgage Interest Rates on House Price Appreciation: The Role of Payment Constraints
Abstract: This research examines the effects of mortgage interest rates on house prices in the 100 largest U.S. cities, with appreciation driven by both short-run dynamics and convergence towards long-run economic fundamentals. The nature of the long-run equilibrium depends on the elasticity of...
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Working Paper 22-03: Applying Seasonal Adjustments to Housing Markets
House price seasonality has been increasing over the last decade, but adjustments have remained largely unchanged in commonly used public data. This paper shows how seasonal adjustments work—both theoretically and applied to observed transactions—when constructing house price indices (HPIs). In...