Research
Dissertation: Second Generation Rent Control and New Construction. Committee: Matthew Baker (advisor and chair), Christos Giannikos, Jonathan Conning.
Economists’ standard objection to rent control is that it chokes off new housing. That objection was earned by the rent freezes of the mid-twentieth century. The laws spreading today are different by design: they cap annual increases instead of freezing rents, exempt new buildings for a period of years (fifteen in Oregon), and let rents reset when a tenant leaves. Whether the old objection carries over to the new laws is an empirical question, and my dissertation answers it three ways.
First, Oregon’s 2019 statute did not reduce new construction overall. Comparing parcels on the two sides of the Oregon–Washington border, I find no aggregate decline. Building on parcels held by absentee owners, the closest proxy for rental construction, fell by about 1.2 per 1,000 parcels, an effect that a single post-treatment year and a pre-existing trend leave imprecise.
Second, the empirical literature never supported the blanket claim. Across 169 studies, rent control reliably lowers controlled rents, raises uncontrolled rents, reduces tenant mobility and unit quality, and raises homeownership, but its effect on new construction and rental supply is not consistently negative. The particular design features a rent control law contains predict its effects better than either a generalized “rent control” label or the subsequent “generation” labels that have come after.
Third, the thirty-four state bans on local rent control do not look like responses to economic or political pressure. They spread from neighbor to neighbor rather than along party lines, and they have no detectable effect on units permitted, whereas other state housing preemptions do.
The implication for policymakers: the construction argument is a reason to design rent control carefully, not a reason to rule it out.
Job market paper
Second-Generation Rent Control and New Housing Construction: Evidence from Oregon's SB 608
This paper covers Oregon's recent passage of SB 608 in 2019, a softer modern rent control that caps the annual rent increases at seven percent on top of an allowance for inflation, makes an exception for new builds which remain free from rent control for their first fifteen years, and allows rents to adjust to the market rate between tenancies. I use parcel-year assessor records on both the Oregon and Washington sides of their shared border in a difference-in-differences design, and I find no aggregate decline in new construction. To find a proxy for rental construction, I use new builds on the parcels held by absentee owners; I estimate these fell by roughly 1.2 per 1,000 parcels relative to those on the Washington side of the border. However, these estimates are attenuated by the existence of only one clean post-treatment year in these data and a contaminating pre-treatment differential trend.
Working papers
By Generation and by Design: A Review of the Empirical Rent Control Literature
This work extends Kholodilin's (2024) review of 169 studies by coding each of the studied regimes by its design features. The relatively loose conventional terms “first and second generation” compress real variation in rent control regimes, and I propose coding on design features as a refined alternative.
State Preemption of Rent Control: Adoption, Diffusion, and Effects on Housing Supply
I seek to answer why states have preempted local rent control, among other housing preemptions, and I find that adoption of rent control preemptions spreads through neighboring states rather than party affiliation or ideology, and that while rent control preemption has no detectable effect, other housing preemptions do have a detectable effect on the number of units permitted.
Other publications
- “The Government’s Share of Health Expenditure: Effects on Life Expectancy & Healthcare Cost Efficiency,” Massachusetts Undergraduate Journal of Economics, 2014.