Housing Job Market Papers 2025 - The Complete List
Where new researchers are looking
This post contains a complete list of housing-related job market papers that we have identified. To find all these papers, we looked through the titles of over 1,000 economics job market papers. We also asked for suggestions from peers. If we’ve missed anything, please feel free to send us suggestions (including your own paper) at abundanceandgrowth@coefficientgiving.org.
For more on why we’re sharing these, take a look at our first post on job market papers.
First we present only titles, so you can quickly skim what’s here. After the titles, we present titles plus abstracts.
Titles Index
Titles are presented in random order. There might be additional authors on these papers - we’ve listed the associated job market candidate only.
Mortgage Rate Lock and House Prices by Justin Katz
Local Spillover Effects of Density Bonus Policy on Housing Production: Evidence from Massachusetts by Aja Kennedy
Zoning and the Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment by Vincent Rollet
Regulatory Hurdles and Costly Delay in Housing Development by Daniel E. Gold
The Redistributive and Efficiency Effects of Property Taxation by Zong Huang
Optimal Land Use Regulations by Shijian Yang
The Expansion and Dynamic Equilibrium Effects of Institutional Landlords by Zhichun Wang
Search, Application, and Allocation in Affordable Housing: Evidence from Massachusetts by Yunus Semih Coskun
Floods and the Frictions of Price Adjustment in Housing Markets by Seonmin Will Heo
Taming the Growth Machine: The Long-Run Consequences of Federal Urban Planning Assistance by Tianfang Cui
Immigration Volatility and Regional Housing Markets by Michael Duncan
How Real Estate Responds to Regulatory Changes Over the Long Run: Evidence from the Closure of Hong Kong’s Downtown Airport by Jingwen Zheng
Rise of Homeownership in China: Insights from a Life Cycle Analysis by Jiahao Jiang
Home Production in the City by Caterina Soto Vieira
Subsidized housing and intergenerational mobility: evidence from Brazil by Bernardo B. Ribeiro
Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility by Benjamin K. Couillard
Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing by Beau Bressler
Efficiency and Redistributive Effects of Progressive Housing Taxation by Anastasis Koufakis
Mortgage Rates and the Price-to-Rent Ratio Across Space by Alberto Nasi
Titles, Abstracts, and Links to Papers
Mortgage Rate Lock and House Prices
Justin Katz
When interest rates rise, fixed-rate mortgages generate a financial incentive for owners to keep their homes, creating “rate lock”. Does rate lock dampen the negative impact of rising interest rates on house prices? To estimate rate lock’s causal effect on market-level house prices, we instrument for the rate lock incentive in the outstanding local mortgage stock using unexpected family size shocks that induce moves at times with different mortgage rates. We find that when interest rates increased over 2021-23, a one standard deviation increase in the rate lock incentive, corresponding to a 0.3pp lower average outstanding mortgage rate, caused 2.6pp higher nominal house price growth. To understand the mechanism, we compare moves of owners who purchase homes just before and just after sharp mortgage rate increases. A 1pp lower outstanding mortgage rate reduces moves from owning to renting by 33%, a force increasing the price-to-rent ratio, and reduces overall moves by 42%. Using these estimated effects on mobility, we calibrate a dynamic structural model to quantify how much rate lock offsets the negative aggregate price effects of a higher cost of capital. Model simulations indicate that the 2021-23 tightening would have reduced the price-to-rent ratio by 9.1% with adjustable-rate mortgages, and hence no rate lock, versus only 3.5% with fixed-rate mortgages. Rate lock thus dampens, but does not fully offset, negative price effects of higher interest rates.
Local Spillover Effects of Density Bonus Policy on Housing Production: Evidence from Massachusetts
Aja Kennedy
Many metropolitan areas in the United States suffer from a housing crisis characterized by housing prices that are unaffordable to low or moderate income residents. One way policymakers address this problem is to increase supply by incentivizing housing production, especially production of incomerestricted housing. A “density bonus” policy is one such intervention. It incentivizes production of dense, mixed-income housing developments by relaxing restrictive local zoning regulations and providing a streamlined permitting process for developers who include income-restricted units in their proposed residential developments. In the case of Massachusetts Chapter 40B, the country’s oldest density-bonus policy, relaxing zoning regulations can be achieved through a state-level override of local restrictions on density. Using Massachusetts Chapter 40B as a case study, this paper analyzes local crowd out effects of mixed-income housing developments in high-income neighborhoods. To do this, I estimate spillover effects of these developments on local housing construction. By using a staggered differences-in-differences technique to compare places with approved 40B developments to places that do not yet have 40B developments approved, I find that, within 0.8 miles surrounding a Chapter 40B development, approval of a 40B development on average diminishes local single-family construction by about 5 percent over the course of 10 years following development approval. Furthermore, when we compare the average number of units in a development with the average negative spillover effect, I estimate that incentivizing one additional 40B unit adds about 0.95 of a unit to the local housing stock, meaning many 40B units are generally not locally inframarginal.
Zoning and the Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment
Vincent Rollet
Cities increasingly grow through redevelopment—demolishing old buildings to make way for new ones. This paper studies this process and how it is influenced by zoning, which regulates the size and uses of new buildings, using New York City as a case study. I build the first parcel-level panel of a city’s buildings, zoning, and floorspace prices. This data allows me to estimate a new dynamic spatial equilibrium model of floorspace supply and demand. I validate the model using quasi-experimental variation from recent zoning reforms and apply it to evaluate the effects of relaxing regulation on construction and affordability. While zoning strongly constrains city growth, the effects of relaxing regulation take decades to materialize and are limited in inexpensive or densely built areas. This is due to the large fixed costs of redevelopment, which rise sharply with the size of existing buildings. These costs generate considerable persistence in city structure and substantially lower the expected gains from relaxing zoning. Furthermore, due to migration, the affordability benefits of zoning reform largely accrue to households outside the rezoned neighborhoods.
Regulatory Hurdles and Costly Delay in Housing Development
Daniel E. Gold
This paper quantifies the supply effects of discretionary permit review, a common but understudied regulatory friction that delays and adds uncertainty to housing development. Using the universe of permit applications in Seattle, Washington, during a period when a unit count threshold for undergoing discretionary permit review was in place, I show that undergoing discretionary review increased permit review time by 4 to 5 months, and that developers reduced unit counts and increased average unit size in order to avoid discretionary review. I then propose a novel extension of prevailing housing production models to multifamily developments that accounts for both the intensive and extensive margins of development. Using data that is freely and publicly available in most jurisdictions, I estimate the model and find that removing discretionary permit review would have increased the number of new units constructed by 5.5% while reducing the average size of new developments by nearly 2%. The estimated change comes largely from the intensive margin, as, in expectation, only two additional parcels would be redeveloped absent discretionary review.
The Redistributive and Efficiency Effects of Property Taxation
Zong Huang
Property taxes raise revenue proportional to housing values, thereby distorting housing consumption and creating unequal tax burdens for households receiving the same public services. This paper develops a spatial equilibrium model to quantify the redistributive and efficiency effects of property taxation. I use household microdata to estimate housing demand: the price elasticity of housing expenditures is 0.54, rejecting a common assumption of unit elastic demand. Counterfactual simulations show that switching from property taxes to a non-distortionary tax increases housing quantity by 2.4%, but decreases equity and increases income segregation. Under a property tax system, low-income households receive implicit transfers of approximately $1,500 annually, whereas high-income households pay $4,000. Increasing redistribution with a progressive tax system is significantly constrained by high-income household mobility.
Optimal Land Use Regulations
Shijian Yang
This paper measures land use regulations across neighborhoods in a city and solves for optimal land use regulations within a general equilibrium model of the city with urban externalities. Land use regulations are hard to quantify because they are bundles of statutory rules whose effects depend on local market conditions. To measure land use regulations, I construct a wedge-based measure of land use regulations that is recovered using data on construction costs and property values. I embed neighborhoodlevel regulations into a general-equilibrium model of a city with productivity and amenity externalities. I show that land use regulations cannot perfectly correct for urban externalities. Land use regulations are second-best policies as they do not directly target people, who are the source of urban externalities, but instead act on real estate. I solve numerically for optimal land use regulations across neighborhoods and use automatic differentiation methods to keep the high-dimensional optimal policy problem computationally tractable. Calibrating the model for the city of Chicago and Cook County, I find that the optimal policy delivers significant welfare gains relative to current land use regulations. Optimal regulations depend less on local amenities and productivity and more on spatial linkages between locations, in the form of residents’access to high-paying jobs and firms’ access to workers.
The Expansion and Dynamic Equilibrium Effects of Institutional Landlords
Zhichun Wang
This paper studies how dynamically formed cost efficiencies from scope and density drive institutional landlords’ expansion and, in turn, alter the distribution of welfare across heterogeneous households in single-family housing markets. Institutional landlords convert owner-occupied homes into large, spatially clustered rental portfolios. They constrain households’ access to homeownership while expanding rental opportunities. This leads households to reoptimize between buying and renting, as buyers may face higher prices while renters may benefit from expanded choice sets. We build a dynamic equilibrium model of landlord investment with three key features: (i) oligopolistic landlords’ investment determines the evolution of housing supply structure, (ii) portfolio size and density introduce endogenous variation in landlord costs, and (iii) households substitute within and across buying and renting in an integrated choice set. We estimate the model using firm-property-level data from 2013 to 2022 in the Atlanta metropolitan area. We find that institutional landlords’ expansion achieved a 60.03% reduction in maintenance cost from economies of scope and density. Households’ total welfare increased, with varying effects across renters and buyers. The majority of renters gained from expanded rental supply, while a small fraction of renters, together with most buyers, lost from diminished access to affordable homeownership. Our findings have significant policy implications for regulating institutional landlords’ expansion in the single-family home market.
Search, Application, and Allocation in Affordable Housing: Evidence from Massachusetts
Yunus Semih Coskun
In many US cities, income-restricted rental housing is allocated through fragmented lotteries rather than a centralized assignment system. This paper studies the Massachusetts affordable housing system as a matching market with costly participation. I develop a static structural model in which households choose how intensively to search over developments and how many applications to submit, trading off the chances of getting an affordable house against heterogeneous search and application costs. Given these endogenous application sets, units are assigned by the status quo uncoordinated waitlists (UW). As counterfactual policies, I simulate assignments under household-proposing Deferred Acceptance (DA) and Top Trading Cycles (TTC). The model is calibrated using synthetic preference data. I construct renter “personas” from the American Community Survey (ACS) and have a large language model (LLM) evaluate Massachusetts-style affordable developments. These evaluations empirically behave like cardinal utilities: within-house preferences are highly aligned, and cross-house variation is systematically related to rent, school quality, and safety. Overall, the results show that lowering search and application costs, for example via centralized information portals and standardized applications, is likely to deliver large fairness gains while reducing overall welfare. Moreover, TTC-style reforms move the market to a corner of the welfare–fairness frontier with higher efficiency but substantially worse fairness, while DA-style reforms do little to improve either equity or welfare in this severely demand-constrained market.
Floods and the Frictions of Price Adjustment in Housing Markets
Seonmin Will Heo
I investigate how housing markets adjust to realized flood events within the floodplain. Using nearly two decades of transaction-level data from Seoul, South Korea. I document that floods lead to delayed and gradual declines in housing prices: lease prices fall within two years of the event, while sales prices decline only after five years. Transaction volumes contract immediately in the lease market and after a lag in the sales market, indicating that market activity responds quickly even though prices adjust slowly. The empirical findings are inconsistent with pure informational frictions and are better explained by seller-side behavioral frictions: homeowners anchored to nominal purchase prices delay sales, thereby delaying price adjustment. The results show that reference-dependent behavior can shape the way how housing markets incorporate climate risk.
Taming the Growth Machine: The Long-Run Consequences of Federal Urban Planning Assistance
Tianfang Cui
We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized growing communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. Using newly digitized records merged with panel data across municipalities on housing and zoning outcomes, we exploit eligibility thresholds and capacity to approve funds across state agencies to identify effects. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability
Immigration Volatility and Regional Housing Markets
Michael Duncan
This paper develops and calibrates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a housing sector to analyze how population volatility affects U.S. housing markets. With declining birth rates and increasingly volatile immigration flows, the U.S. faces demographic uncertainty unprecedented since World War II. Because housing supply is local and slow to adjust, population shocks can generate uneven regional responses depending on vacancy rates and supply elasticities. In the model, a one-percent increase in population growth raises home values and rents by roughly five percent within five years. Most of the cost pressure is offset by households substituting toward smaller housing units, while sluggish housing investment fails to fully accommodate higher demand. In declining regions, the population shocks are absorbed without lasting price pressures. These results highlight how demographic shocks propagate through housing markets and how local supply conditions mediate their impact on affordability.
How Real Estate Responds to Regulatory Changes Over the Long Run: Evidence from the Closure of Hong Kong’s Downtown Airport
Jingwen Zheng
Cities increasingly relax building height limits, or “upzone,” to expand housing supply. Yet in built-up areas, new construction requires costly redevelopment of existing buildings, a process shaped by both present policy incentives and anticipated future changes. This paper exploits two major upzoning reforms in Hong Kong, driven by innovations in airport operations, to examine how developers respond to regulatory relaxation under evolving policy uncertainty. In 1989, the city relaxed height limits by 43 percent along a newly narrowed flight path and announced plans to relocate the downtown airport. This move raised expectations—yet also uncertainty—about the scale and timing of future upzoning. When the airport closed in 1998, all restrictions were lifted, triggering one of the largest upzonings ever around the world. Using 30m × 30m grid-level data spanning three decades and a spatial regression discontinuity design at the upzoning borders, I find three main results. First, developers’ supply response to the 1989 reform was limited despite a sizable relaxation of binding height limits. Second, developers reduced maintenance and investment in areas anticipating larger future reforms, as evidenced by a rapid deterioration of flat quality. Third, redevelopment surged after the 1998 upzoning, closing prior differences in building height and quality across the upzoning borders within a decade. Thus, large-scale deregulation can overcome the frictions of durable, costly structures and spur housing supply once uncertainty resolves. However, uncertainty itself raises the option value of waiting and delays investment. Together, these findings highlight the importance of credible, well-timed large-scale upzonings over incremental adjustments for expanding housing supply in dense urban areas.
Rise of Homeownership in China: Insights from a Life Cycle Analysis
Jiahao Jiang
Between 2010 and 2015, China’s urban homeownership rate increased by 8.5 percentage points. This paper examines the drivers of this surge using a general equilibrium overlapping-generations (OLG) model with life-cycle housing tenure choice. The model incorporates heterogeneous agents and fixed-payment mortgages to quantify the effects of four concurrent policy and market developments: reductions in down-payment requirements, declines in mortgage rates, the emergence of online real estate platforms, and the expansion of subsidized affordable housing programs. Calibrated to Chinese data, the model shows that in the short run, the combined effect of four factors can increase homeownership rate by about 7.5%. In addition, reductions in mortgage rates and targeted subsidies account for the majority of the increase. A cut in mortgage rates raises ownership by 4.5%, while the expansion of affordable housing programs increases it by 4.7%. Welfare analysis further indicates that the combined reforms enhance household well-being, with the largest welfare gains stemming from lower mortgage rates.
Home Production in the City
Caterina Soto Vieira
By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities, predominantly mega-cities. Agglomeration drives up productivity, but the commuting costs may act as a brake by incentivizing specialization within the household, and thus potentially decreasing female labor force participation. Using origin-destination travel data from the mega city of Sao Paulo in Brazil, I document that labor force partici- ˜ pation declines sharply with distance from the city center, a spatial gradient largely driven by married women. When women work, they not only face lower wages, but also commute in slower modes of transport, relying more often on public transport and less on driving than men. To quantify the implications of these patterns for the economy, I model the trade-off between benefits of agglomeration and the cost of commuting using a quantitative spatial framework in which couples and singles decide where to live and whether and where to work. My model reveals that if women faced the same commuting costs as men, labor force participation would increase by 10.3 percentage points—an effect larger than equalizing labor market returns by gender—with especially strong impacts for married women on the urban periphery. This shows that investing in transportation infrastructure that makes commuting equal by gender would draw many women into the labor market, substantially narrowing the gender gap in labor supply.
Subsidized housing and intergenerational mobility: evidence from Brazil
Bernardo B. Ribeiro
Housing assistance programs are among the most widely used policies to provide affordable housing to low-income families worldwide. In this paper, we study a largescale subsidized housing program in Brazil and estimate its effects on individuals who received their homes as adults and those who were exposed as children. We find that adult beneficiaries experience small declines in formal employment. Unlike in other settings, these effects are not driven by spatial isolation, but are instead consistent with modest income effects. In contrast, the impacts on children are large and transformative. Those who receive subsidized housing at age 11 are 22 percent more likely to hold a formal job at age 25 than those who receive their homes at age 18 or older. These gains are concentrated among children of the poorest families and are driven by the proximity to high-quality schools.
Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility
Benjamin K. Couillard
Many developed countries face low and falling birthrates, potentially affected by rising costs of housing. Existing evidence on the fertility-housing cost relationship typically uses geographic variation (raising selection issues), neglects unit size, and says little about policy. To progress on these fronts, I first specify a dynamic model of the joint housing-fertility choice allowing choices over location and house size, estimated using US Census Bureau data. I extend ‘micro-moment’ techniques (Petrin, 2002; Berry et al., 2004a) both to circumvent data constraints and to incorporate heterogeneous residuals, which can prevent misspecification. Housing choice estimates confirm a Becker quantity-quality model’s predictions: large families are more cost-sensitive, and so rising housing costs disincentivize fertility by disproportionately reducing the value of having a large family. To quantify this effect, I vary housing costs directly within the model, finding that rising costs since 1990 are responsible for 11% fewer children, 51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s, and 7 percentage points fewer young families in the 2010s. Policy counterfactuals indicate that a supply shift for large units generates 2.3 times more births than an equal-cost shift for small units. This analysis concludes that the supply of housing suitable for families can meaningfully contribute to demographi sustainability.
Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing
Beau Bressler
This paper studies the long-term neighborhood effects of the American public housing program, one of the largest and most controversial American urban policies of the 20th century. I construct a new national dataset tracking the locations, completion dates, and characteristics of over 1 million public housing units built between 1935 and 1973, which I link to neighborhood-level data from 1930 to 2010. I document that public housing projects were systematically targeted towards initially poorer, more populated neighborhoods with higher Black population shares, reflecting the program’s slum clearance goals and racialized site selection politics. Using a stacked matched difference-in-differences approach, I estimate causal effects of public housing construction on neighborhood change by comparing treated neighborhoods to matched control areas within the same county based on pre-treatment characteristics that predict placement. I find that public housing construction caused large, persistent increases in Black population shares and substantial declines in median incomes and rents within project neighborhoods. Geographic spillovers to nearby neighborhoods were modest, characterized by small increases in Black population shares driven primarily by white population decline, alongside small declines in median incomes. I find evidence consistent with neighborhood tipping dynamics: neighborhoods with initial Black shares in a plausible tipping range experienced substantial white population outflows. Finally, linking to intergenerational mobility data, I show that children from low-income families who grew up in public housing neighborhoods experienced significantly lower rates of upward mobility than those in comparable control areas. These findings demonstrate that mid-century public housing, despite intentions of slum clearance and revitalization, reinforced existing patterns of racial and economic segregation with lasting consequences for economic opportunity.
Efficiency and Redistributive Effects of Progressive Housing Taxation
Anastasis Koufakis
Is it optimal to introduce progressivity in housing taxation? We explore this question by constructing a heterogeneous agent model featuring housing and entrepreneurship, calibrated to the Spanish economy. Our results indicate that a progressive housing tax can significantly enhance aggregate welfare and influence the economy through multiple channels. By imposing higher taxes on high-value properties, the policy curbs housing demand and lowers house prices—particularly benefiting lower-income and younger households. Moreover, it encourages rich households to reallocate savings from housing toward productive capital, thereby stimulating investment, output, and wages. In an economy with entrepreneurs, the optimal tax design combines a flat income tax with a highly progressive housing tax, as elevated income tax rates at the top discourage business expansion. The equilibrium price effects and resulting welfare gains from this policy are amplified when housing supply is more inelastic.
Mortgage Rates and the Price-to-Rent Ratio Across Space
Alberto Nasi
This paper develops a parsimonious housing market model that conceptualizes residential real estate as both a non-tradable consumption good and an investment asset. The framework embeds households’ joint location–tenure choices, which shape local price-to-rent ratios. I test its predictions using a granular dataset of Italian housing prices and rents and a shift-share instrumental variable design exploiting heterogeneity in mortgage uptake across age groups. The results show that mortgage rate shocks induce spatially asymmetric responses in prices, rents, price-to-rent ratios, population, and tenure choices, consistent with the implications of the model. A structural estimation reproduces these heterogeneous effects and indicates that a positive mortgage rate shock alleviates spatial welfare inequality and narrows the divide between renters and homeowners