PhD, UC Berkeley Haas, 2025 BA, University of Pennsylvania, 2017
Leveraging the entry of large-scale landlords and property-level data, I show that increasing rental supply in American suburbs where rentals are scarce and expensive reduces segregation by enabling financially constrained renters to move into neighborhoods they otherwise could not afford to own. Nearby incumbents are more likely to leave, perceiving renters as a disamenity. To understand the mechanism, I estimate landlords’ willingness to pay for geographic concentration, and quantify local scale economies. A quantitative spatial model with segmented housing markets shows that down payment-constrained households benefit but the median household loses out from forgone non-pecuniary homeownership benefits and endogenous amenities.
Presentations
SFS Cavalcade (2025); UEA Europe (2025); ASSA/AREUEA Poster (2024); Berkeley Law CLSC (2024); Berkeley Public Finance and Labor Mini-Symposium (2024); UEA North America; RUSH Brownbag (2023); Berkeley Trade, Real Estate, Finance, and Public Finance Seminars (2022-)Awards
John Clapp Best Poster Award, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association
Hacked: Misuse of Mortgages by Landlords (w/ Grace Choi)
To promote homeownership, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) provides high-leverage mortgages to first-time homebuyers. Using a dataset on the portfolio of the near universe of property owners in nine Californian counties that we obtain through partnerships with city officials and journalists, we find that landlords use FHA mortgages to finance rental investment. Leveraging property-level panel data on mortgage performance and a unit-level rent registry panel, we study whether FHA mortgaged-landlords are financially riskier and whether they target a specific segment of the rental market (e.g., Section 8 Voucher tenants) compared to other landlords.
Spatially Targeted Leverage Regulation and Rental Housing (w/ Jaeyeon Lee)
We study a macroprudential policy that lowered the marginal loan-to-value ratio down to 0% in "hot" housing markets. The drastic reduction in credit supply had negligible effects on house price growth in the affected neighborhoods. We propose a spatial equilibrium model with mobility frictions to show how tightening credit stimulates local rental markets. Renters provide liquidity to landlords who acquire properties that financially constrained households cannot afford. House price effects are muted and housing wealth is redistributed from households to deep-pocketed landlords.
The Impacts of Refugee Influxes: Evidence from Administrative and Cellphone Data in Jordan (w/ Michael Gechter, Nick Tsivanidis, and Nathaniel Young)
What does a migrant influx imply for the welfare of both urban incumbents and the migrants themselves, and what policies are most effective for relieving the associated problem of congestion? Using administrative data, call detail records (CDR) for the universe of cellphone transactions made on one of Jordan’s largest operator’s network from mid-2015 until the present and a linked survey we conducted, we document patterns of migration into Amman at high spatial and temporal frequency and examine the effects of the migrant influx given city structure.