Working Papers
Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market (with John Eric Humphries, Scott Nelson, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger). November 2024. [PDF]
Abstract
Recent research has documented the prevalence and consequences of evictions in the United States, but our understanding of the drivers of eviction and the scope for policy to reduce evictions remains limited. We use novel lease-level ledger data from high-eviction rental markets to characterize key determinants of landlord eviction decisions: the persistence of shocks to tenant default risk, landlords’ information about these shocks, and landlords’ costs of eviction. Our data show that nonpayment is common, is often 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. We develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of the eviction decision that captures this trade-off. Estimated eviction costs are on the order of 2 to 3 months of rent, and the majority of evictions involve tenants who are unlikely to pay going forward. As a result, while commonly-proposed policies can generate additional forbearance for tenants, they do not prevent most evictions. Compared to policies that create delays in the eviction process, increasing filing fees or providing short-term rent subsidies are more likely to prevent evictions of tenants who would resume paying.
Matching with Random Components: Simulations (with Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié). December 2019. [PDF]
Abstract
Several recent papers have analyzed matching markets under the dual assumption of perfectly transferable utility and a separable joint surplus. Separability rules out any contribution to the joint surplus of a match of interactions between characteristics of partners that are unobserved by the analyst. Since it may be unrealistic in some settings, we explore the consequences of mistakenly imposing it. We find that the biases that result from this misspecification grow slowly with the magnitude of the contribution of the interaction terms. In particular, the estimated complementarities in the Choo and Siow (2006) model are remarkably robust to the inclusion of interaction terms.
Work in Progress
Data Interoperability and Competition: 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: The Importance of Secondary Markets for Electric Vehicle Subsidy Design (with Aaron Berman and Nathaniel Hickok)