Research

REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS

The Babies of Mortgage Market Deregulation

Review of Financial Studies, 2020

This paper documents that mortgage market deregulation helps mitigate the risk of population aging by affecting a foundational family-level decision: the choice to have children. Using a U.S. federal regulator ruling, I show that young households fully exposed to mortgage market deregulation increase their probability of purchasing a home and having a child by 6 percentage points. Supplemental tests reject alternative hypotheses based on income or housing wealth growth and, instead, suggest that access to space is the relevant economic mechanism. Collectively, the evidence indicates that increased access to mortgage credit affects the total number of children in the economy.

Internet Appendix
Link to RFS
Link to SSRN

Interest Rates and the Distribution of House Prices

Review of Economic Studies, Accepted

How do interest rates affect the distribution of house prices? I develop a housing assignment framework and exploit incidental differences in the income distribution to identify the model. A one percentage point decline in mortgage rates causes a 6% contemporaneous increase in home values in middle-priced neighborhoods. High-priced neighborhoods experience half of this increase, while low-priced neighborhoods exhibit no change. Mortgage applications exhibit a similar pattern. The results also underscore the persistence of interest rate shocks. The rate shocks in between Jul-2000 and Dec-2001 account for a significant amount of price variation in middle-priced neighborhoods during the 2000s housing boom.

Link to SSRN

Priced-Out: Rent Control, Wages, and Inequality (with Geraldo Cerqueiro, Pedro Raposo, and Derek Wenning)

Jan 2025

We show that after a quasi-exogenous loss of rent control in Portugal, low-income workers’ earnings decline significantly. High-income workers are unaffected, despite both being equally likely to migrate outside the city. We further show that the wage decline stems from transitions to lowerquality jobs outside the city, which we connect to relatively high commuting costs for low-income workers. In particular, the negative impact on wages is driven by individuals who do not own a personal vehicle and rely on public transit for commuting. We explore alternative policies through the lens of a quantitative commuting model with rent control. Our counterfactual analysis examines housing voucher policies, including a recent policy introduced by the Portuguese government. Relative to rent control, housing vouchers reduce taxation on landlords and reduce regional inequality among low-income workers, but only replicate low-income workers’ welfare gains if they do not impose implicit mobility restrictions.

Link to SSRN

Financing Growth with Future Taxes: Evidence from TIF (with Seohee Kim)

Jun 2025

Can cities use projected property tax revenue in underdeveloped areas to stimulate business dynamism and alleviate poverty? We analyze the rollout of Tax Increment Financing state-level legislation, beginning in the 1960s, that allows municipalities to earmark future property tax revenue for economic development, and find that it leads to an increase in new business formation and job creation that would not have happen otherwise. Further, it increases dynamism in affluent central counties surrounded by poorer areas. Among individuals without a college degree, this policy intervention reduces statewide poverty rates, with effects persisting for over 10 years. Our results indicate that state-level statutory frictions may hinder local governments' efficient deployment of capital.

FINANCIAL AND LABOR ECONOMICS

Information Dispersion Across Employees and Stock Returns (with Ashwini Agrawal and Zhongchen Hu)

Review of Financial Studies, 2020

-> Review of Financial Studies Best Paper Award in Behavioral Finance

Rank-and-file employees are becoming increasingly critical for many firms, yet we know little about how their employment dynamics matter for stock prices. We analyze new data from the individual CV’s of public company employees and find that rank-and-file labor flows can be used to predict abnormal stock returns. Accounting data and survey evidence indicate that workers’ labor market decisions reflect information about future corporate earnings. Investors, however, do not appear to fully incorporate this information into their earnings expectations. The findings support the hypothesis that rank-and-file employees’ entry and exit decisions reveal valuable insights into their employers’ future stock performance.

Link to RFS
Link to SSRN

Forced Entrepreneurs (with Kristoph Kleiner)

Journal of Finance, 2022

-> Journal of Finance Brattle Group Prize Distinguished Paper awarded

Conventional wisdom suggests labor market declines drive workers towards temporary entrepreneurship and self-employment, lowering the quality of startups. Analyzing the employment histories of 640,000 workers, we document graduating college during a period of high unemployment does increase entry to entrepreneurship. However, based on multiple measures of success, including survival, growth, innovation, and venture capital funding, recession-driven entrepreneurs are equal to or more capable than voluntary entrepreneurs. Explaining these results, we find labor shocks disproportionately impact workers with the greatest wage potential and these same workers start highly-successful firms. Overall, we confirm the prevalence of untapped entrepreneurial potential in the workforce, especially across the top of the income distribution.

Link to JF
Link to SSRN

Competing for Talent: Firms, Managers, and Social Networks (with Kristoph Kleiner)

Review of Financial Studies, 2022

Do social networks help firms recruiting talented managers? In our setting, firms are randomly connected to prospective young managers through former employees. Under a discrete-choice model, we find networks increase the likelihood firms hire high-ability managers, while having no effect on the hiring rate of low-ability managers. Effects are greatest for nonlocal firms, strong ties, and peers living in the same neighborhood. Survey evidence suggests social networks promote recruitment by providing information about firm fundamentals to potential applicants. Our results help rationalize why the majority of managers hold prior connections to the firm.

Link to RFS
Link to SSRN

No Experience Necessary: The Peer Effects of Intended Entrepreneurs (with Kristoph Kleiner)

Review of Finance, 2024

Under a randomized setting, this paper finds workers with entrepreneurial ambition--intended entrepreneurs--are (i) far more common than workers with past entrepreneurial experience and (ii) increase the rate of entrepreneurship among their peers. Peer effects are persistent, stronger for tighter networks, and extend to the decision to join a startup. As intended peers explain half of the variation in entrepreneurship rates in our sample, our results demonstrate that intended entrepreneurs, even those that never personally start a firm, represent a vital component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Link to RF
Link to SSRN

Racial Prejudice in the Workplace and Firm Boycotts

Journal of Political Economy, Reject and resubmit

I investigate the impact of contemporary grassroots boycotts on addressing racial discriminatory practices within a firm. Introducing new data on allegations of racial prejudice in the workplace, I show that when these allegations are more (randomly) prominent to prospective employees and consumers, foot traffic declines by 4-5% at stores located in predominantly non-white, young, and low-income zip codes. Additional results show that information spreads quickly between internet platforms, shedding light into the mechanisms of a grassroots boycott. A randomized survey experiment confirms that prospective employees and consumers boycott a firm after learning about incidents of workplace racial prejudice.

Link to SSRN

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Reproducibility in Management Science (Member of the Reproducibility Collaboration Team)

Management Science, 2023

With the help of more than 700 reviewers, we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hardware and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95% of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced. However, for 29% of articles, at least part of the data set was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample reduces the share of reproduced articles to 68%. These figures represent a significant increase compared with the period before the introduction of the disclosure policy, where only 12% of articles voluntarily provided replication materials, of which 55% could be (largely) reproduced. Substantial heterogeneity in reproducibility rates across different fields is mainly driven by differences in data set accessibility. Other reasons for unsuccessful reproduction attempts include missing code, unresolvable code errors, weak or missing documentation, and software and hardware requirements and code complexity. Our findings highlight the importance of journal code and data disclosure policies and suggest potential avenues for enhancing their effectiveness.

Link to Management Science