My dissertation contains three chapters where I employ spatial hedonic modelling, reduced-form estimations and causal inference techniques to analyze urban demographics, migration and the housing market in the U.S. The first chapter employs generalized difference-in-difference to estimate the impact of COVID-19 regulations on the year-on-year of changes in housing sales and building permits approval. This chapter attempts to investigate if and how these interventions causally impacted the county-level housing sales and building permits approval in the U.S. The second chapter formulates a spatial hedonic equilibrium model to show inter-city impacts of the introduction of work-from-home, with multiple worker types. The third chapter explores how community characteristics at a city level correlate to fatal police encounters over the period 2000-2010.

The first chapter explores the effect of public policies like shelter-in-place and eviction moratoria on relative housing sales and building permits approved for construction. Shelter-in-place orders could potentially limit the ability of home-buyers and sellers to interact as well as they could pre-COVID, introducing frictions in the process of selling houses. Prolonged and over-lapping eviction moratoria could dampen the construction of multi-family units. This paper attempts to investigate if and how these interventions causally impacted the county-level housing sales and building permits approval in the U.S. The paper estimates the average treatment effect of these orders using a traditional generalized difference-in-difference estimator and a more recent variation of the estimator that is more suited multiple treatment groups with staggered treatment introductions and withdrawals. The results show that shelter-in-place is associated with significantly smaller year-on-year changes in sales of single-family houses, condominiums and the collection of all residences. Selective moratoria on eviction hearings and judgements are also found to be associated with smaller year-on-year changes in multi-family building permit approvals. Apart from the baseline model, the chapter also employs an additional estimator to add robustness to the results. SIP is found to be associated with significantly smaller relative changes in sales of single-family houses, condominiums and the collection of all residences. Selective moratoria on eviction hearings and judgements are also found to be associated with smaller relative changes in multi-family building permit approvals.

The second chapter formulates a spatial hedonic equilibrium model that shows inter-city impacts of the introduction of work-from-home. Following Brueckner, Kahn and Lin (2021), the paper attempts to theoretically study how the introduction of work-from-home, which allows workers to relocate across cities while keeping their original jobs, impacts housing prices, population and employment levels. Extending Brueckner et al. (2021), the current paper divides the workforce into two types of workers, remote and non-remote, to allow for a more realistic work-from-home model. Additionally, the model uses explicit functional forms for production and utility, resulting in closed-form equilibrium solutions conditional on the extent of productivity advantages, amenity advantages, and degree of complementarity between worker types. The current paper aims to examine whether the main results in Brueckner et al. (2021) still hold in the modified model.

The third chapter aims to answer if and how community characteristics at a city level correlate to fatal police encounters over the period 2000-2010. Panel and cumulative datasets on police-involved deaths from FatalEncounters.org, along with a relevant set of socio-demographic controls, are used in a negative binomial regression model to find factors that might affect the count of officer-involved deaths that occurred in a city. For the longitudinal panel data, the Black population and the Hispanic population in a city along with police employment, the level of crime and median income constitute significant determinants of officer-involved deaths. With panel and cumulative datasets used in negative binomial regression models, it is found that, for the longitudinal panel data, the Black population and the Hispanic population in a city along with police employment, the level of crime and median income constitute significant determinants of officer-involved deaths.

The three chapters in this dissertation can be separated into two sections, each seeking to answer a different question. The first question (in Chapter 1) is whether information about the behavior of others affects charitable giving from lapsed donors. The second question (in Chapters 2 and 3) is whether (and to what extent) land use regulations affect housing prices and housing construction.

Using data from an experiment carried out by a large nonprofit organization, Chapter 1 finds that lapsed donors who received a solicitation letter referencing a relatively high donation made by another donor (high social information) were more generous in giving, but overall less likely to make a donation, relative to the baseline (low social information) group. Thus, high social information can have potentially offsetting effects when applied to lapsed donors. Nonprofits should consider this trade-off when employing social information fundraising techniques to solicit donations from lapsed donors.

Chapter 2 estimates the extent to which the supply of new housing is restricted by land use regulations, using a panel of California cities from 1970-1995. While land use regulation is found to significantly reduce residential development, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using city and year (two-way) fixed effects reduces the magnitudes of the estimates by 50-75%. Attenuation bias from measurement error can only account for a small proportion of this reduction, suggesting that studies based on cross-sectional policy variation, which predominate this literature, may overestimate the effects of land use regulation.

Using data from a survey of top land use officials in communities across the state of California, Chapter 3 provides a measure of both local regulatory stringency and the degree to which geographic constraints inhibit local development. After exploring differences in regulatory patterns across the state, the index is applied to a model of housing prices. Land use regulation in California is related to the level of that state’s housing prices, but not the elasticity of housing supply. Instead, where housing demand increased through the expansion of subprime lending, geographic constraints exacerbated the run-up and subsequent crash of local housing prices.

This dissertation examines the impact of parking policies and social influence on commute mode choice using discrete choice analysis. A key feature of the dissertation is overcoming the problem of insufficient data by using unique datasets, building unique datasets, or exploring appropriate estimation strategies and assumptions.

Chapter 1 studies the impact of parking prices on the decision to drive to work using the California Household Travel Survey. The chapter tackles estimation challenges posed by insufficient parking information. The first challenge is the estimation of parking prices for those who do not drive, which is addressed by using a sample selection model. The second challenge is to understand the effect of the extent of the prevalence of Employer-Paid parking coupled with incentive programs offered in-lieu of parking. To address this challenge, two extreme scenarios are examined, and a range for the marginal effects of parking prices is estimated; one scenario assumes everyone receives Employer-Paid parking coupled with in-lieu of parking incentives, and the second assumes that no one is offered such incentives. The results suggest that higher parking prices reduce driving, regardless of the followed approach. It is estimated that a 10% increase in parking prices leads to a 1 - 2 percentage point decline in the probability of driving to work. Moreover, there seems to be no evidence of sample selection bias. The evidence suggests that parking pricing can indeed be an effective transportation demand management tool.

Chapter 2 extends the analysis of Chapter 1 to simultaneously estimate the impact of parking pricing, parking availability, and urban form on commute mode choice. The joint role of these three factors is examined using a dataset that is constructed by merging three major different data sources. The California Household Travel Survey data are matched to two unique datasets on parking for Los Angeles County; one for prices and the other availability. Chapter 2 first examines how these three factors affect the binary decision of whether to drive, while controlling for a rich set of covariates. The analysis then becomes more specific and examines how these factors affect particular commute modes in a multinomial context. The results indicate that parking prices have a significant negative impact on the decision to drive to work, where a 10% increase in parking prices is associated with a 1.1% drop in the probability of driving to work. Both on-street and off-street parking availability at home, as well as urban form measures of the workplace tract, are found to significantly affect commute mode choices. These findings have important policy implications in terms of minimum parking requirements, maximum parking standards, employer-paid parking, and parking pricing policies.

Chapter 3, on the other hand, examines the impact of a number of fundamental determinants of commute mode choice on transit use, and introduces the role of social influence. The determinants explored cover socioeconomic characteristics, built environment and neighborhood characteristics, transit accessibility, and trip characteristics. Social interactions have been found to affect many of the decisions of economic agents, and are likely to play a role in the decision to use transit. A unique dataset is built to conduct this analysis across a number of major US cities and examine the effects in both the residence and workplace neighborhoods, where a neighborhood is defined as a census tract. Social influence is explored along three different dimensions: space (neighborhood), income, and race. A novel instrumental variable is constructed in order to identify spatial social influence, and an alternative identification strategy is devised to identify income-group and racial social influence. The evidence suggests that spatial social influence exists among both coworkers and residential neighbors, and that peer effects among coworkers are larger than those among residential neighbors. Moreover, income-group social influence, among both coworkers and residential neighbors, plays a significant role in the rich commuter's decision to use transit. However, racial social influence does not affect a commuter's decision to use transit, regardless of race.

This dissertation contains three chapters in urban and transportation economics. The first chapter analyzes the flight-frequency choices of a monopoly airline serving a hub-and-spoke network with asymmetric demands. In the 3-city hub-and-spoke network, demand is allowed to differ across markets. Analysis is done separately for two distinct passenger types: those who assign zero cost to layovers, and those who assign a very high cost. Both cases result in a higher flight frequency on the higher-demand spoke. Using a simulation, the flight-frequency choices for the two models are compared, and results show that the difference between the flight-frequency choices on the high and low demand spokes is smaller in the high-cost-layover case than in the zero-cost case.

The second chapter continues investigating airline economics by studying airline response in the event of a government shutdown. A shutdown creates a negative demand shock for airlines as government employees no longer travel for work and citizens cannot visitgovernment sites for either work or recreational purposes. This analysis attempts to estimate the effect of this demand shock on traffic as well as the responding fare changes. Evidence suggests that, for every percent of the labor force in endpoint cities attributed to federal employees, carriers lose about 35 passengers per month on non-stop flight segments, and fares are found to be $3.11 lower on average in quarters where shutdowns occur.

Finally, chapter three uses empirical data to conduct a foundational study on Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). With cities across the United States facing a housing shortage, ADUs offer a unique development strategy to fill low-density residential zones. This paper examines ADUs in Los Angeles to discover what housing and location factors contribute tohomeowners’ decision to construct an ADU. The analysis finds that larger homes on lots with higher land value – though not necessarily larger lots – tend to encourage more ADU construction. The paper then investigates the effect of an ADU on property value. An instrumental variable approach is used by exploiting a California law that removed several barriers to ADU permits. Results suggest that addition of an ADU increases the property value of a parcel by about 56 percent.

This dissertation revolves around understanding the determination of transportation networks and service quality, as well as quantifying the impact of these decisions on social welfare.

The first chapter, “Subway Capitalization in Beijing: Theory and Evidence on the Variation of the Subway Proximity Premium”, discusses the heterogeneity of the urban transit capitalization effect and its policy implications. This chapter analyzes the relationship between community attributes and the subway home-price capitalization effect, asking whether the magnitude of the subway proximity premium is affected by neighborhood economic status and location. Using longitudinal data from Beijing, the chapter empirically estimates that decreasing a community’s distance to a subway station by 10% increases the housing price per square meter by 0.2%-0.9%. The chapter also shows that, subway capitalization effect is around 0.1%-0.2% lower for communities that charge a 1 Yuan higher property management fee. Moreover, the analysis also reveals that the subway capitalization will decrease by around 0.08% as a community’s distance to the CBD increases by 1 km.

The second chapter, “1-Hub, 2-Hub or Fully Connected Network? A Theoretical Analysis of the Optimality of Airline Network Structure”, focuses on the determination of airline network structure, and provides a simple justification for the existence of the multi-hub networks. This chapter sets up a formal model to explore the optimality of multi-hub networks, with or without competition. It is shown that a single-hub or a fully connected network may not be the optimal network configuration, while a 2-hub configuration may be favored under certain circumstances. In addition, the chapter shows that competition can also affect an airline’s optimal choice of network: a 2-hub network can be preferable if a competitor enters the market.

The third chapter “Service Competition in the Airline Industry: Schedule Robustness and Market Structure” investigates the relationship between airline’s schedule robustness (how well can a schedule cope with a delay to a particular aircraft) and market structure. Recognizing that schedule robustness is an important factor affecting the flight on-time performance, the chapter shows that there exists service quality competition in the airline industry, as carriers adopt more robust flight schedules when competition heats up. Such results shed light on the debate on the magnitude of airport congestion tolls, and have great public policy implications.

The three chapters in this dissertation analyze data from studies done with a focus on understanding marginalized people groups. The first analysis (in Chapter 1) looks at the lives of children in poor households in Ecuador, in particular by estimating the effects of the household-level determinants on educational achievement and on the incidence of child labor. The second two analyses (Chapters 2 and 3) attempt to understand the determinants of homelessness in Costa Mesa.

Chapter 1 finds that the Bono Desarrollo Humano in Ecuador has a positive effect on reducing child labor in the current generation, and perhaps secondary effects into subsequent generations. I also find that child labor and household educational attainment have a negative correlation, even after controlling for other observables.

Chapter 2 utilizes a novel dataset and to study homelessness and finds that the self-reported cause of homelessness is a determining factor. It also finds, as would be expected, that education and the presence of family nearby lessens the intensity of homelessness.

Chapter 3 investigates how a homeless individual's intensity of homelessness is predicted by the individual's discount rate and attitudes toward risk. The ex-ante hypothesis is that an increase in homeless intensity could be driven by an decrease in patience and/or an increase in risk tolerance. The hypothesis is tested by using a novel application of weighted least squares to regress the individual's homeless intensity (HIM) on the risk and discount variables mentioned above, as well as on the clearly exogenous individual-level characteristics. Evidence is found to support the hypothesis, in that a decrease in patience is associated with an increase in the individual's HIM. Increasing levels of risk tolerance are associated with an increase in the HIM as well, and this effect appears to be significant even with the inclusion of observably risky behaviors.

The data for Chapter 1 was obtained from the Ministry of Social Development of the Government of Ecuador. The data for Chapters 2 and 3 come from two surveys the author conducted himself. The first took place in October of 2012 and the second occurred in April 2014.

This dissertation tries to answer some important questions in labor and transportation economics in an attempt to broaden understanding of different topics.In the first chapter “Correlated Labor Market Risk and Housing Investment” I show that households have lower levels of housing investment when they live in areas with labor markets that are more correlated with their industry of employment. I find that if a household lives in an area where many other households work in the same or similar industries, then housing may be a riskier asset as it is more correlated with labor market income. In response household decrease their investment in housing, and this This decline is driven by concentrations and riskiness of other correlated industries, suggesting agglomeration in one industry can have negative spillovers to workers of other related industries. The second chapter “Loyalty rewards and redemption behavior: Stylized facts for the U.S. airline industry” joint with Alexander Luttmann, provides a novel identification method for frequent flyer tickets in a comment industry database, DB1B. Using the FFAs we identify, we show how the characteristics of award tickets differ from paid tickets and how these characteristics have changed over time. We then demonstrate how various market and product quality characteristics influence the share of passengers traveling on FFAs. Finally, we find that price dispersion increases on routes with larger shares of frequent flyer passengers, implying that airline loyalty programs enhance market power. In the third chapter, “Help Really Wanted? The Impact of Age Stereotypes in Job Ads on Applications from Older Workers” joint with Ian Burn, Daniel Firoozi and David Neumark, We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard jobs, using language from real job ads collected in a prior large-scale correspondence study. We modify the job-ad language to randomly vary whether the job ad includes ageist language regarding age-related stereotypes. In contrast to a correspondence study in which job searchers are artificial and researchers study the responses of real employers, in our research the job ads are artificial and we study the responses of real job searchers. We find that job-ad language related to ageist stereotypes, even when the language is not blatantly or specifically age-related, deters older workers from applying for jobs. The change in the age distribution of applicants is large, with significant declines in the average and median age, the 75th percentile of the age distribution, and the share of applicants over 40. Based on these estimates and those from the correspondence study, and the fact that we use real-world ageist job-ad language, we conclude that job-ad language that deters older workers from applying for jobs can have roughly as large an impact on hiring of older workers as direct age discrimination in hiring.

This paper develops a simple analytical model of price and frequency competitionamong freight carriers. In the model, the full price faced by a shipper (a goodsproducer) includes the actual shipping price plus an inventory holding cost, whichis inversely proportional to the frequency of shipments offered by the freight carrier. Taking brand loyalty on the part of shippers into account, competing freightcarriers maximize profit by setting prices, frequencies and vehicle carrying capacities. Assuming tractable functional forms, long- and short-run comparative-staticresults are derived to show how the choice variables are affected by the model’sparameters. The paper also provides an efficiency analysis, comparing the equilibrium to the social optimum, and it attempts to explain the phenomenon of excesscapacity in the freight industry.

This dissertation consists of three essays on urban economics. The first essay applies the concept of agglomeration economies to the firm using a theoretical model of worker interaction. Next, the second essay takes an empirical approach to evaluate the efficacy of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest housing program in the United States of America, in addressing residential crowding across the nation. Finally, the third essay empirically investigates the effect of grocery stores on property values by analyzing the effects of the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health program in New York City. Each essay's conclusion comments on amenities and what influences them. The first essay sheds light on why a firm would want to invest in its social infrastructure even if socializing is not directly related to productivity. Technological agglomeration economies are one reason for the existence of big cities, a common example being "cross-fertilization" that occurs when workers of different firms interact with each other. This "cross-fertilization" could be applied to workers in a specific firm, presenting a reason for a firm to invest in socializing at the workplace. A theoretical model of worker interaction shows that the socially optimal level of socializing is risk dominated by lower levels of socializing, even when socializing is beneficial for productivity. A profit maximizing firm recognizes the benefits to productivity and would prefer its workers to socialize more, at the socially optimal level. Hence, greater profits from increased productivity drive the incentive for a profit maximizing firm to invest in the work environment.

The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program in tackling the problem of residential crowding. Prior research shows that expanding the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program has varying price effects on different parts of the rental housing market. While recipients will certainly benefit from the added vouchers, there is ambiguity in the impacts on quality of life for non-recipients in the broader housing market. Excessive crowding in homes, dubbed overcrowding, is one measure of quality of life because overcrowding can lead to adverse outcomes such as stunted child development, adverse mental health, and an increased risk in spreading infectious diseases such as COVID-19. This paper makes use of an exogenous increase in the supply of Section 8 housing vouchers in a panel setting to ascertain the effectiveness of a program provided at the federal level in tackling housing overcrowding throughout the nation. Estimation of a linear probability model shows that adding vouchers reduces the incidence of overcrowding: a 10% increase in the supply of vouchers reduces the likelihood that a housing unit is overcrowded by 0.081 percentage points. The mechanism behind the effect is shown to correspond with anecdotes about overcrowding: households experiencing misfortune, financial difficulties, or other tenuous circumstances double-up with higher-income households. Hence, a voucher enables the troubled household to move into more suitable living arrangements.

The third essay explores the Whole Foods Effect. The effect of grocery stores on property values is difficult to establish because of the endogeneity between where people choose to live and where grocery stores choose to operate. This paper is the first to establish that nearby grocery stores are local amenities, leading to higher property values, by using the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program in New York City. On average, a residential property located near a new grocery store experiences a 7.94% increase in value. An exploration of mechanisms indicates that opening more grocery stores not only contributes a direct effect to the increase in property values through an improvement of local amenities, but that it also attracts and sustains complementary businesses such as restaurants, thereby leading to a further increase in property values through an indirect improvement of local amenities.