More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We...

The COVID-19 pandemic saw an unprecedented expansion of federal emergency rental assistance (ERA). Using applications to ERA lotteries in four cities linked to survey and administrative data, we assess its impacts on housing stability, financial security, and mental health. We find that...

We use the price effects caused by the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, to study the transfer of wealth across income groups. First, we find that rent control caused property values to fall by 6-7%, for an aggregate loss of $1.6 billion. A calibrated model of house prices...

Housing instability is a constant fact of life for many people in the United States – a fact which is made more urgent and salient during periods of economic disruption such as that caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A relatively new line of research has illuminated the degree to which housing...

Governments throughout the world intervene heavily in housing markets, and most have multiple policies to pursue multiple goals. This chapter deals with two of the largest types of housing policies in the United States, namely, low-income rental assistance and policies to promote homeownership...

Following popular discourse, we abuse economic terminology by defining the "housing shortage" in the United States as the difference between the number of homes that would be built in the absence of supply constraints and the actual number of homes. The magnitude of the housing shortage is...

We provide an analysis of the housing market and current housing policies in three developed countries: the United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, and the United States (US). We focus on these three countries mainly due to the marked differences in their institutional settings. The UK is...