UC Irvine

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.