This study evaluates the effect of affordable housing policy on households' rent burden using the 421-a Tax Exemption Program in New York City. The program requires developers of housing projects in Geographic Exclusion Areas (GEA) to provide 20% of new units as affordable housing for a tax...

Renderings are digital visualisations of urban development projects in the field of urban design that aim to create spatial knowledge about future-built urban environments, which we also refer to as imaginaries. In our contribution, we ask how visual artists design renderings, how they try to...

The START-UP NY program is a creation-based entrepreneurial policy that sets up enterprise zones in several New York counties. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that the program does not affect entrepreneurial activity in the industrial sectors it targets: manufacturing and...

Assessing rent discounts implied by rent regulation is challenging because the counterfactual rents of regulated units in the unregulated market are not observed. We estimate these counterfactual rents and predict the quality-adjusted rent discount for each rent-stabilized unit in New York City...

The privatization of once publicly-funded affordable housing is the primary tool for preserving and maintaining affordable housing. This process, however, is quietly creating urban migration patterns that are altering the demographic profile of cities with cumulative change that we cannot fully...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...

We examine the potential for incentivizing reforestation of abandoned agricultural lands in New York State through two tax policies: a property tax exemption and an income tax credit. We compare the incentivization structures of both policies by simulating net benefits to landowners and total...

The global detrimental consequences of pollution require young adults to take ownership of their sustainable and responsible consumption through green habit formation. We study four green behaviors that promote cleaner behavior and responsible consumption among college students: a strong tap...

Crime negatively affects housing values. However, little empirical evidence documenting the amenity value of how people are policed exists. Stop & Frisk was a particularly salient policing tactic employed in New York City until a judge ruled it to be unconstitutional. This study uses exogenous...

Online shopping surged in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the pre-pandemic shift toward increased online consumer activity. This trend fed into concerns over the success of top retailers at the expense of smaller ones. Further, it raised questions of whether consumers...

We propose a cross-nested logit (CNL) approach to address the question of how people revise their migration decisions when facing changes in the global environment. Compared with the popular logit model, the CNL allows for more sophisticated substitution patterns between destinations. Using...

We study a program that funded 39,000 Jewish households in New York City to leave enclave neighborhoods circa 1910. Compared to their neighbors with the same occupation and income score at baseline, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after removal, and these gains persisted to...

Rent stabilization is valuable to occupying tenants because it limits rent growth. Assessing the rent discount implied by this policy is challenging because the counterfactual rents that rent-stabilized units would command in the unregulated market are unobservable. Using novel data from 2002 to...

We analyze the relationship between prenatal WIC participation and birth outcomes in New York City from 1988-2001. The analysis is unique for several reasons. First, we restrict the analysis to women on Medicaid and or WIC who have no previous live births and who initiate prenatal care within...

Systematic infrastructure underinvestment – a $2.6 trillion ‘gap’ – and accelerating climate change have become facts of life in the United States. Though typically attributed to politics, this Article posits the underlying cause as a market disequilibrium rooted in infrastructure’s...

New York City faces the twin problems of housing segregation and a shortage of affordable housing. In response, Mayor Bill de Blasio developed Housing New York, a plan to create or preserve 300,000 affordable units across a variety of income bands. As part of this plan, the City instituted...

Intermediaries in decentralized markets can affect buyer welfare both directly, by reducing expenses for buyers with high search cost and indirectly, through a search-externality that affects the prices paid by buyers that do not use intermediaries. I investigate the magnitude of these effects...

I model the labor supply of taxi drivers as the result of optimization based on an inter-temporal utility function. Since income effects in response to temporary fluctuations in daily earnings opportunities are likely to be small, cumulative hours will be much more important than cumulative...

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation of a demand equation using time series data is shown to produce a weighted average derivative of heterogeneous potential demand functions. This result adapts recent work on the causal interpretation of two-stage least squares estimates to the simultaneous...

American local governments own and manage a wide portfolio of enterprises, including gas and electricity companies, water systems, subways, bus systems and schools. Existing theories of public ownership, including the presence of natural monopolies, can explain much of the observed municipal...

COVID-19 and the ensuing restrictions in most cities around the world have resulted in unprecedented changes in the daily life of people. While everyone has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in unique ways, the impact on certain disadvantaged groups is particularly severe. This paper aims...

We study the effect of rent stabilization in NYC on tenant unemployment from 2002 to 2017. We show rent stabilization increases tenants’ unemployment by six percentage points, more than double the average unemployment rate during the study period. Moreover, the effect is concentrated in...

This paper examines bidding in auctions for state highway construction contracts on Long Island in the early 1980s, in order to determine whether bid rigging occurred. Detection of collusion is possible because of limited participation in the collusive scheme. The paper looks at differences in...

This chapter encourages readers to think of agricultural communities in the era of climate change-induced droughts and population growth similar to when western Pennsylvania’s steel industry collapsed in the 1980s. If water must flow uphill to money, it should not leave a dust bowl behind....

There is a well-established association between income and child health. We examine the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides cash assistance to low-income children with disabilities, to assess how this relationship arises. We use a large database of Medicaid administrative...

We use a vector autoregression to examine the dynamic relationship between the race-specific percentage of pregnancies terminated by induced abortion and the race-specific percentage of low-birthweight births in New York City. With monthly data beginning in 1972, we find that induced abortion...

Using data from the New York City Police Department's Stop-and-Frisk program, we evaluate the impact of a specific terrorist attack threat from Al Qaeda on policing behavior in New York City. We find that after the Department of Homeland Security raised the alert level in response to this...

Concerns about the lingering novel Coronavirus may have led to long-term structural change in desired dwelling locations in some large U.S. cities, such as New York City. Densely concentrated neighborhoods may be at higher risk of virus contagion, giving more individuals incentives to move out....

This study investigates the relationship between institutional investors’ information acquisition through on-site meetings with firms and the informativeness of their trading decisions conditioning on investors’ information processing skills. To identify private interactions, we create and...

This short article discusses the ruling that imposed a lifetime ban on “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, perhaps the most notorious “bad actor” in the pharmaceutical industry, and required that he pay $65 million in excess profits he obtained from anticompetitive conduct relating to the drug...

As World War I began in 1914 and European stock markets shuttered, foreign investors turned to removing gold from the United States, sparking fears of bank runs and suspension of convertibility. At the start of August 1914, the New York Clearing House Association (NYCH) again authorized the...

The Panic of 1893 was one of the deepest economic depressions before the Great Depression of 1931. As a precautionary measure to stem the fall in reserves caused by country bank withdrawals, the New York Clearing House (NYCH), a private clearinghouse that operated as a de facto lender of last...

This work focuses on the sensitivity of the performance of the moving average (MA) trading rule of technical analysis to changes in the MA length employed. Empirical analysis of daily data from NYSE, the Vienna Stock Exchange (VSE) and the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) reveal high variability of...

This paper investigates different dynamics of two competing services, namely Uber, the app-based ride services and Borough (Green) Cab taxis, in the outer boroughs of New York City (NYC), focusing on the space and time distribution of their pick-up patterns. Uber is a new entrant to the taxi...