UCLA

In Chapter 1, I examine how Los Angeles citywide discontinuous increases in real estate transfer taxes, aimed at preventing homelessness and funding affordable housing, actually affected housing supply. Using the city boundary as a natural experiment, I find that the tax reduced both home sales and new construction. I assemble a novel dataset of building permits, using AI-powered textual analysis of permit descriptions to extract granular information on construction activity. Sellers clustered transactions just below the tax threshold, while developers broadly reduced construction activity rather than pivoting to affordable or multi-family housing. Luxury homeowners increasingly chose remodeling over selling, further constraining supply. These findings suggest that taxing high-end properties may undermine rather than improve housing affordability. This paper offers novel insights into the effects of high-value property transaction taxes.In Chapter 2, I find that when COVID-19 containment policies were imposed sequentially across U.S. states, the cumulative layering of restrictions produced compounding effects on house prices. Comparing adjacent county-pairs that straddle state borders, I find a two-phase dynamic response. In the first two months following an additional workplace-closure policy, house price growth in the treated county declines relative to its cross-border counterpart. This initial decline reverses over subsequent quarters: by nine to eleven months out, the treated county exhibits significantly higher price growth, and cumulative gains turn positive within a year. The short-run contraction is consistent with demand suppression from uncertainty and reduced market activity. The medium-run appreciation is consistent with the view that workplace closures durably reshaped residential demand by accelerating the shift to remote work. The pattern is robust to one-to-one matching of county pairs.In Chapter 3, I show that disaster risk propagates through supply chain networks to downstream customers, producing an asymmetric timing pattern: affected customers increase capital expenditure immediately but experience significant sales declines only several quarters later. The investment spike is consistent with emergency procurement and the search for alternative supply sources. The delayed revenue loss is consistent with the gradual depletion of inventory buffers. Both effects survive the exclusion of customers ever located in a disaster zone, confirming that the channel runs through supply chain linkages rather than direct exposure. Customers with more diversified supplier bases are partially insulated from the upstream shock.