Working Papers
Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market (with John Eric Humphries, Scott Nelson, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger). June 2025. Submitted. [NBER] [BFI] [CBR] [SIERP]
Abstract
Recent research has documented the prevalence and consequences of evictions, but our understanding of underlying drivers of the eviction rate and the scope for policy to affect it remains limited. In this paper, we study landlords' decisions to evict tenants and how these decisions may be influenced by policy. We combine novel lease-level ledger data from low-income rental markets with a model of the landlord's eviction decision to characterize the persistence of shocks to tenant default risk, landlords' information about these shocks, and landlords' cost of eviction. Our data show that nonpayment is common, is frequently tolerated by landlords, and is often followed by recovery, suggesting that landlords face a trade-off between initiating a costly eviction or waiting to learn whether a tenant can continue paying. Our dynamic discrete choice model of the eviction decision captures this tradeoff. Estimates indicate that filing an eviction costs landlords the equivalent of 2-3 months of rent, and that the majority of evictions involve tenants who are unlikely to pay going forward. This implies that uniformly applied policies can generate additional forbearance for tenants, but they do not prevent most evictions. We find that 15% of those evicted would have resumed paying rent, suggesting a role for more targeted interventions. Among the policy instruments we consider, direct financial incentives for landlords—such as taxes and subsidies—are more likely to durably prevent evictions than procedural delays.
The Econometrics of Matching with Transferable Utility: A Progress Report (with Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié). June 2025. [PDF]
Abstract
Since Choo and Siow (2006), a burgeoning literature has analyzed matching markets when utility is perfectly transferable and the joint surplus is separable. We take stock of recent methodogical developments in this area. Combining theoretical arguments and simulations, we show that the separable approach is reasonably robust to omitted variables and/or non-separabilities. We conclude with a caveat on data requirements and imbalanced datasets.
Work in Progress
The Distributional Effects of Data Interoperability: Evidence from the U.S. Residential Mortgage Market
Copyrights and Product Variety: Evidence from the Golden Age of Hip Hop
Out with the Old, In with the New: Equity and Efficiency of Secondary-Market Subsidies for Electric Vehicles (with Aaron Berman and Nathaniel Hickok)