There's a vigorous debate about whether various urban factors, like density, lower birth rates. In a new paper, Umit Gurun and David Solomon propose a new one that they claim accounts for 90% of the recent decline in birthrates:E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth … [Read more...]
“The traditional model”
On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen linked to a new paper in Real Estate Economics by Anthony W. Orlando and Christian L. Redfearn. It's a simple, empirical paper using data from 8 metro areas in California and Texas. It finds that net new housing creating appears to become more expensive and more … [Read more...]
No Solutions, Just Tradeoffs
File under "sad", not under "surprising":We provide evidence of intensified discriminatory behavior by landlords in the rental housing market during the eviction moratoria instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected from an experiment that involved more than 25,000 inquiries of … [Read more...]
And the Oscar for best paper goes to…
A friend asked what are the best papers supporting land use liberalization. That's a broad question, but here are some of my answers.AffordabilityThe basic case for zoning reform, across the political spectrum, is that the rent is too damn high. Michael Manville, Michael Lens, and Paavo … [Read more...]
Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes
Updated 1/11/24 to add 3 new papers, Wegmann, Baqai, and Conrad (2023), Dobbels & Tavakalov (2023), and Hamilton (2024). The original post was published 3/14/23.A concerted research effort has brought minimum lot sizes into focus as a key element in city zoning reform. Boise is looking at … [Read more...]
An Autopsy of Hsieh & Moretti (2019)?
Update 11/20: Chang-Tai Hsieh counters that Greaney's critique ignores general equilibrium effects which make labor scale invariant. That doesn't address the alleged coding errors. We'll see - and perhaps I wrote an autopsy too early. Thanks to Bryan Caplan for getting Hsieh's response out to the … [Read more...]
A quick primer on CBTC and driverless trains
While doing some research for an article about driverless trains, I came across this document by Mircea Georgescu (who most recently worked at Thales [I think?] and whose email I can't track down! Mircea, if you're reading this, trimite-mi si mie te rog frumos un email la [email protected]!), that's … [Read more...]
New Research on the Economics of Green Buildings
There is little reliable research into the economic returns of high-performance (green) features of buildings, but Professor John Quigley plans to release his groundbreaking research on the subject this Fall.I am very excited to learn this news, and will certainly look forward to reviewing the … [Read more...]