Research

My current projects are listed below. They revolve around housing but some use macro techniques such as DSGE modeling, VECM and SVAR estimation, while some rely on more reduced form microeconomic techniques like differences-in-differences estimation.  In the future, I am looking forward to expanding my research domain in housing. I am interested in understanding the role vacancies play in the adjustment of prices in housing markets. There is huge variation in quality and pricing of housing even within small housing markets so I am interested in researching the interactions to understand disparities of outcomes across households of different socioeconomic status. I would also like to understand more how the composition of migrants to a region (domestic or international and high or low skill) may have differential outcomes in housing and investment markets. In sum, my future research endeavors are focused around housing affordability, utilization, and migration.

"Immigration Volatility and Regional Housing Markets" - Job Market Paper

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.

"Rental Registries and Housing Markets: Rent Control in Disguise?"

In this paper, I quantify the impact of local municipalities implementing a rental registration program on landlords. I create a dataset of rental registries in the US and analyze their impact on rental prices, housing supply, and spillovers into owner-occupied housing using an event study from 2005-2019 with ACS data. I find that rental registries increase rental rates above the direct cost to the landlord from the registry. The costs are higher for lower income individuals and the program bids them out of their neighborhoods. Surprisingly, communities with rental registries appear to have a faster growing housing supply relative to those without. It is difficult to make analysis on overall welfare without quality data on units so the overall impact remains undetermined.

"Monetary Policy and Housing Dynamics: Reassessing the Previous Model" - with Daniel Centuriao, Eduardo Minuci, and Scott Schuh

This paper replicates and refines the macro VAR model from Fratantoni and Schuh (2003), addressing its structural limitations and theoretical inconsistencies to provide a more robust framework for analyzing housing and monetary policy interactions. By imposing theoretically grounded restrictions, we enhance the model's ability to disentangle key relationships, such as the effects of monetary policy on housing demand and prices. Using updated data from 1966 Q3 to 2024 Q1, we assess the model's robustness through additional specifications, including the inclusion of relative prices (rental prices to house prices ratio) and the application of structural restrictions to improve identification. Our findings show significant improvements in model fit and interpretability, offering insights into monetary policy transmission and paving the way for future research, such as the exploration of heterogeneous regional effects using HVAR frameworks.