Academic collaboration is a key driver of innovation. Using international journal publication data, this study examines how transfers of university presidents among 111 prestigious public universities in China affect inter-university academic collaboration. Based on PPML estimates, we find that appointing a president to a university who has previously studied or worked at another university leads to an approximately 10% increase in the quantity of collaboration between the two institutions during the president’s period in office at the receiving university. In contrast, comparable transfers of university party secretaries do not generate such effects. The impact of presidential transfers is stronger for collaboration within the president’s own field of study, for university pairs that are geographically more distant, and for presidents who face stronger promotion incentives. In addition, presidential transfers stimulate collaboration regardless of whether the president’s current university or the connected university is listed as the first affiliation on a publication.
Many communities in the U.S. have programs that make financial assistance available to families with low incomes who are struggling to pay rent. In this paper, we examine the average and distributional impacts of reducing wait times for emergency housing assistance on evictions. Taking advantage of administrative data from Franklin County, Ohio and exploiting exogenous changes in application processing times in two complementary empirical approaches, we find that each additional week of delay in receiving assistance increases the probability of an eviction filing within 12 months by 19–29%. A substantial share of the additional filings result in judgments against tenants. Our results have important implications for the design and implementation of emergency rental assistance programs. More broadly, our findings speak to the downstream impacts of passive compliance costs in social safety net programs.
We study whether restaurants in more visible urban locations receive different customer ratings, consistent with consumer-search models in which prominence interacts with search frictions. Using 1.5 million Yelp reviews of 61,000 restaurants in 18 cities across eight countries, we relate ratings to three location-based proxies for prominence: proximity to tourist landmarks, street corners, and public squares. Across specifications with rich controls and user-city fixed effects, restaurants in more prominent locations receive lower ratings. The results are robust to comparing nearby establishments and to checks addressing selection, crowding, and measurement, and we interpret them as consistent with a worse price-quality mix in prominent locations when continued search is costly.
Since 2015, French municipalities facing high housing market pressures have been allowed to levy a surcharge on the housing tax applied to second homes. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we find a substantial decline in the declared number of second homes and a significant increase in housing tax revenues in treated municipalities, but no evidence of a decrease in housing prices. Drawing on dwelling-level transition microdata, we show that most of the apparent reduction in second homes is driven by strategic reclassification for tax purposes rather than genuine changes in occupancy.
Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) programs provide short-term rental subsidies to help people experiencing homelessness secure market-rate housing. Using linked administrative data from Los Angeles County, we examine the causal effects of RRH on subsequent homelessness, as well as health, crime, public assistance, and labor market outcomes. We compare the outcomes of individuals and families who enrolled in an RRH program and received the subsidy (that is, leased up) to otherwise similar people who enrolled in the same RRH program in the same month but did not lease up. Participants who leased up received an average subsidy of $1500 per month for seven months, with families receiving more generous subsidies than individuals. Leasing up reduced homeless service use over four years by 30% for individuals and 25% for families, including reductions after the end of the subsidy period for both groups. Effects persisted for families, but faded out for individuals after three years. Likewise, leasing up improved health and criminal justice outcomes and increased income from public assistance programs for families, but not individuals. We find no evidence that leasing up reduced employment or earnings for either group based on statewide administrative data. The results indicate that short-term rental subsidies can meaningfully reduce homelessness, especially for families.
How do changing shopping habits shape cities? We investigate this question in the context of major shop closures. Leveraging geocoded crime and economic data at the level of small areas covering England and Wales, we examine the effects of these closures on criminal activity and urban dynamics. Our findings reveal that closures lead to significant increases in crime. These effects survive a battery of robustness checks and are highly localised. We also find evidence for wider changes to urban areas triggered by the closures. Our results highlight broader implications for declining inner-city areas and the "death of the high street''.
We estimate the effect of local regulatory approval times on housing production. The analysis derives from a novel dataset of development timelines for all multifamily housing projects permitted by the City of Los Angeles between 2010 and 2022. Results indicate that a 25 percent reduction in approval times would have increased the rate of housing production in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2022 by 12.7 percent, simply by pulling forward in time the completion of projects already begun. The production gains are even larger upon accounting for the role of approval times in incentivizing new development. Discretionary approvals are shown to be especially salient to development timelines. The estimated impacts on development are also shown to be heterogeneous across project type and space, and correlated with neighborhood socioeconomic status. Results underscore the importance of municipal regulatory reform to the achievement of housing production goals.
We assess how minimum wage effects on restaurant employment in the U.S. vary with market size and monopsony power. Using city-level data, we construct monopsony proxies based on labor flows and concentration. Minimum wages bind less in larger cities, consistent with the urban wage premium, and omitting this relationship overstates how labor market power reduces adverse employment effects of minimum wages. Nonetheless, accounting for size, lower labor market fluidity is linked to weaker employment effects, consistent with search models. By contrast, concentration-based proxies are less informative in this setting: employer-density measures move opposite to theory, while HHI exhibits insufficient variation.
We revisit the evolution of the relationship between mortgage debt and income, adding to the growing literature that extends beyond the 2000s housing boom. Our analysis reveals a permanent decline in the correlation between purchase mortgage amounts and borrower incomes that occurred in the 1990s and was largely complete before the 2000s housing boom. We attribute the decline in the debt-income correlation to a transition in underwriting practices, as lenders moved from human judgment to data-driven statistical models of mortgage default that better identified risky borrowers and enabled broader access to mortgage credit. Using a simple model, we show that patterns observed in the 1990s, including slow price growth and large increases in homeownership, are consistent with a substantial expansion of credit to lower-income households.
Flattening government hierarchies not only reduces organizational layers but also restructures fiscal capacity, reshaping both local growth incentives and regional redistribution. This paper identifies a fundamental trade-off: while flattening promotes equalization across regions, it simultaneously undermines economic efficiency at the local level. We develop a multi-tier government model showing that reallocating fiscal authority upward enlarges common revenue pools, which enhance redistribution but dilute local governments’ incentives to foster growth. Empirically, we exploit China’s staggered Province-Managing-County (PMC) reform as a quasi-natural experiment and apply a stacked difference-in-differences strategy to county-level panel data from 2000 to 2007. We find that the PMC reform significantly reduced intra-provincial inequality—measured by Gini, Theil, and related indices—but concurrently lowered county GDP per capita. Reductions in physical investment and firm-level productivity, rather than shifts in labor input, drove the efficiency loss. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that provinces with stronger fiscal pooling (higher VAT-sharing ratios) and broader administrative spans experienced a more severe equalization–efficiency trade-off. Our findings extend fiscal federalism and organizational structure theories by showing how hierarchy flattening and fiscal pooling jointly shape the balance between redistribution and local economic performance.
The fracking revolution has exposed more than 15 million American residents to drilling within 3 miles, a tripling from conventional extraction methods. While the economic benefits are distributed across nearby counties, the environmental and neighborhood costs are concentrated within miles of a well. Using granular data on exposure and outcomes, I show that nearby fracking activity shrinks neighborhood population by 5%. The spatial decay, temporal pattern, and mechanisms of this treatment effect operate to debunk the stylized argument that fracking creates local boom towns.
We estimate the causal effect of ride-hailing entry on transport-related air pollution, disentangling its mediating effect through changes in commuting modes in U.S. cities. To do so, we combine two sets of empirical approaches. First, for our main outcome regression, we leverage granular satellite-based NO2 concentration data and a newly constructed Google Trends-based measure of ride-hailing presence, with the staggered difference-in-differences design. Second, to explore its mediating mechanism, we use household-level commuting mode data to run two auxiliary regressions: commuting modes on ride-hailing entry and ambient NO2 concentration on commuting modes. For identification on the latter, we construct our instruments by combining geography-based instruments with leave-one-out regional average exposure to Uber's official entry. We find robust evidence that (i) ride-hailing improves air quality in highly dense cities, but has no significant impact in cities with low to medium density and (ii) this air quality improvement is indeed mediated by the associated changes in commuting mode choices. Our findings provide strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the environmental impact of ride-hailing depends on its complementarity with public transit.
This paper examines the impact of early 20th-century rent control laws in New York City, exploiting judicial discretion as a source of variation. The 1920 regulations empowered municipal court judges to decide whether rent increases were "reasonable", with rulings shaped by partisan affiliation. We assemble a new dataset of over 20,000 rental listings from the New York Times (1918-1930) and more than 7000 archival building permits, linked to records on 125 district judges. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design at municipal court district boundaries, we find that market rents rose by nearly 10 percent when crossing from Democrat-to Republican-controlled districts after rent control. We examine supply effects using a difference-in-differences design. We show that judicially enforced rent control substantially reduced residential investment: total residential investment was about 76 percent higher in landlord-friendly districts during the rent-control period. Together, these findings demonstrate how judicial discretion shaped both prices and investment, leading to systematic differences in profits and construction activity across districts, which likely shaped the medium-run build environment.
Following the discovery of gold in 1694 in Brazil, pathways were constructed to connect coastal settlements to mining regions in the unpopulated interior. While these pathways initially facilitated the creation of road towns, their influence faded by the late nineteenth century. With the mid-twentieth-century demographic and industrial transition, regions with higher historical road density experienced renewed population growth and greater migrant inflows. We argue that this resurgence reflects the role of road towns in supporting early urbanization and structural transformation. Using an extended Rosen-Roback-Glaeser framework, we estimate strong agglomeration spillovers, consistent with Brazil's spatial economy exhibiting multiple steady states and possible historical path dependence.
Why do regions decline? This paper explores how adverse shocks in one period affect regional adjustment to subsequent shocks, emphasizing the role of selective migration. I leverage differential exposure to coal's decline and variation in proximity to historical employment shifts to study this process of regional decline in Appalachia. The consequences of the 2007-2017 coal shock were more acute in counties that experienced larger declines in college-educated adults due to exogenous labor demand shifts in the 1980s. These findings indicate that the adverse effects of shocks can accumulate over time, leaving certain regions differentially vulnerable to new challenges.
This paper investigates how Asian immigrants affect U.S. housing prices and identifies the mechanisms underlying these effects. Using annual county-level data from 2009 to 2018 and a dual instrumental variable approach, we decompose the overall impact of Asian immigrants into education-related and non-education channels. We find that roughly 30%-40% of the housing price increase associated with Asian immigration is driven by the capitalization of improved educational amenities, while the remaining 60%-70% reflects non-education forces, such as home-biased foreign capital inflows and other neighborhood changes. The education-related capitalization effects are greater in counties with a higher share of Asian school-aged children, underscoring the key insight that immigrant composition - specifically, who arrives - matters for how immigration shapes local housing markets.
