Research

My research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, housing, and urban and regional economics. I study how demographic change, monetary policy, and local institutions interact with slow-moving housing supply to shape prices, investment, affordability, and regional economic outcomes. My work combines structural macroeconomic modeling with applied econometric methods, including DSGE models, vector error correction (VECM), and structural VAR (SVAR) models.

A common theme across my research is the adjustment of households, firms, and local markets to economic shocks when important quantities cannot respond immediately. My job market paper studies how population shocks propagate through regional housing markets, while other projects examine rental regulation and the transmission of monetary policy through housing. I am also beginning a new line of research on gift card liabilities, corporate short-term funding, and monetary policy transmission.

Going forward, I am particularly interested in understanding how regional linkages, housing supply constraints, migration, and financial markets shape the transmission and distributional consequences of macroeconomic shocks.

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

Population growth has become increasingly uncertain as declining natural population growth has coincided with more volatile migration flows. Because housing is durable, geographically fixed, and slow to construct, unexpected population changes can generate persistent mismatches between local housing demand and supply. This paper studies how those demographic shocks propagate through regional housing markets and how the resulting adjustment depends on local supply conditions.

I develop and calibrate a DSGE model with stochastic population growth, housing investment frictions, and vacancy-driven adjustment. Population shocks affect housing demand immediately while construction responds gradually. In the baseline model, a one-percent increase in population growth raises home values and rents by approximately five percent within five years. Housing supply expands more slowly than population, causing households to substitute toward less housing consumption while prices absorb much of the initial demand pressure.

The model also generates substantial regional heterogeneity. Housing adjustment depends on underlying population trends, construction costs, supply elasticity, and available vacancies. More constrained housing markets experience larger price responses and less quantity adjustment, while more elastic markets accommodate a greater share of population growth through additional housing supply.

I evaluate the model's mechanisms empirically using a panel vector error correction model estimated with annual state-level data from 1986–2023. The estimates identify long-run relationships between population and housing supply and between house prices and rents. Following a one-standard-deviation population growth shock, the housing stock increases by roughly 0.6 percent after eight years while house prices rise by approximately one percent, consistent with the model's central prediction that housing supply adjusts gradually to demographic change.

"Local Government Rental Registration Policies and the Housing Market"

This paper studies how local rental registration policies affect rents, home prices, and housing supply. I construct a novel dataset of rental registry policies across 493 U.S. counties and combine it with American Community Survey data from 2005–2019 in a difference-in-differences framework that accounts for both policy timing and treatment intensity. While I find little evidence of large average effects on rents, home prices, or housing supply, important distributional effects emerge: rents rise by approximately 3.5 percent where registries broadly cover the housing stock and by roughly 5.5 percent in the lowest-priced segment of the rental market, with no detectable effects for higher-priced units. These results are consistent with compliance and rehabilitation costs being disproportionately passed through to renters in lower-quality housing. 

"Re-examining the Framework for Macro Modeling of Monetary Policy and Regional Housing " - with Daniel Centuriao, and Scott Schuh

Submitted to the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking

This paper revisits and extends the macro-housing framework of Fratantoni and Schuh (2003) to study how monetary policy and mortgage-finance conditions transmit differently through housing and non-housing sectors. Using quarterly U.S. data through 2019, we compare the original VAR specification with a revised rates-based model, a structurally identified SVAR, and an expanded specification incorporating additional financial and housing variables. Housing remains substantially more cyclical and interest-sensitive than non-housing activity, while the post-1998 period exhibits weaker transmission from federal funds rate shocks and a larger role for mortgage-finance conditions. The revised specification better separates monetary policy from movements in the mortgage spread and provides a foundation for extending the framework to heterogeneous regional housing markets.