Living Space
Towards a Methodology for Measuring Rental Property Ownership in the United States
Stephanie Kestelman et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2026
Abstract:
Roughly one-third of U.S. households rent their homes, yet measuring who owns rental property is difficult: ownership is frequently obscured by LLCs, partnerships, and other intermediary entities that separate legal from economic control. We develop a method that traces ownership through administrative records -- combining deeds and property assessments with the Census Bureau's Business Register, IRS Schedule K-1 filings, and SEC filings on REITs -- to identify ultimate owners and construct property portfolios across the full landlord size distribution. Applying the method to 11 large CBSAs, we find that individual landlords own a large majority of rental units, though their share varies meaningfully across markets. We also show that the widely used mailing-address aggregation approach both under- and over-states portfolio size in systematic ways. The method is designed to scale to national coverage and to support measurement of landlord identity, portfolio composition, and ownership concentration in U.S. rental markets. We also discuss the method's current limitations and outline directions for refinement and validation.
Rent control, rent overcharge, and racial disparity
Brent Ambrose et al.
Real Estate Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rent control policies have gained renewed legislative momentum in the United States, but are rent-regulated landlords adhering to these policies? Answering this question is critical to understanding the policy's impact. Using a unique panel data set from the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS), we investigate noncompliance with rent caps in New York City. We uncover evidence indicative of widespread rent overcharging. During our sample period, over 30% of rent-stabilized apartments without turnover had rent increases exceeding the city's rent caps. Moreover, we find that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be overcharged than their White counterparts. Supplemented with building permit and code violation data, we provide evidence that our findings are unlikely to be driven by policy provisions that allow additional rent increases, notably (1) preferential rent and (2) major capital improvement.
Political Architecture: Contextual Development and Opposition to Housing
Adrian Pietrzak & Tali Mendelberg
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
American cities face a housing affordability crisis, partly because of public opposition to dense housing. Explanations have focused on property values, congestion, or demographics. This literature neglects a factor familiar to urban planners: architecture. We argue that people have contextual development preferences and oppose developments that don't "fit" the surrounding neighborhood in height and style. We test this hypothesis with survey experiments employing a novel visual approach with tightly controlled but realistic images of buildings and neighborhoods. We find that buildings which fit are supported more, an effect which isolates the interaction of building architecture and context. The effect holds for homeowners and renters, and urbanites and suburbanites, suggesting it is not driven by concerns over property values or density alone. Moreover, buildings that don't fit prompt intentions to engage in costly political behavior. When we impose trade-offs, support drops, but remains high, suggesting contextual fit preferences are meaningful.
Does Banking Consolidation Harm Households?
Celso Brunetti, Jeffrey Harris & Ioannis Spyridopoulos
Federal Reserve Working Paper, May 2026
Abstract:
No, in the mortgage market. Using confidential micro-level data combining mortgage contracts with credit and repayment records for 44 million loans spanning 5,000 bank mergers over nearly three decades, we find no changes to mortgage rates, approval rates, or delinquency rates. Local mortgage markets remain remarkably competitive despite consolidation, averaging over 100 active lenders in each county every post-merger quarter. Our findings reveal significant merger selection motives: large acquiring banks target community banks with relationship-intensive, portfolio-lending business models, whereas community banks appear to merge together to gain scale and compete. Overall, our study challenges the view that bank mergers increase market concentration and create market power that harms household borrowers.
Regulating Zombie Mortgages
Jonathan Lee, Duc Duy Nguyen & Huyen Nguyen
Review of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the adoption of Zombie Property Laws (ZL) across several US states, we show that requiring lenders to maintain properties in the foreclosure process affects mortgage lending decisions and standards. Difference-in-differences estimations using a state border design show that ZL incentivizes lenders to screen mortgage applications more carefully: they deny more applications and impose higher interest rates on originated loans, especially risky loans. In turn, these loans exhibit higher ex-post performance. ZL also affects lender behavior after borrowers become distressed, causing them to strategically keep delinquent mortgages alive. Our findings inform the debate on policy responses to foreclosure crises.
Flood Risk, Insurance, and Housing in the United States
Suvy Qin & John Voorheis
NBER Working Paper, May 2026
Abstract:
Flooding is among the most salient natural hazards facing households in the United States. A large body of evidence has documented a pattern of disproportionate social vulnerability in floodplains. However, little evidence exists on how household-level exposure to flood risk is distributed. We fill this gap by combining parcel-level flood risk with confidential linked survey and administrative data held at the US Census Bureau. Although net migration to Census blocks in floodplains has increased in recent years, there has been essentially no net migration to parcels with flood risk or change in the overall share of households living in floodplains. Income gradients in flood risk are highly non-linear at the household level, with slightly negative income gradients for the bottom 90 percentiles of the income distribution that are dwarfed by disproportionate exposure in the top decile, especially when considering multiple property ownership. This nonlinearity is largely driven by differences in building type and homeownership within narrow income groups. In contrast to the conclusions in the literature using aggregate data, our household-level analysis suggests that households in floodplains are less disadvantaged and increasingly protected from the impacts of flooding, even as a vulnerable subpopulation of low-income, uninsured homeowners remains.
Pricing of Climate Risk Insurance: Regulation and Cross-Subsidies
Sangmin Oh, Ishita Sen & Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
Journal of Finance, June 2026, Pages 1161-1215
Abstract:
Homeowners insurance is central to managing the rising losses from climate-related disasters. We show that insurance premiums are subject to starkly different regulations across states, creating persistent cross-subsidies and price distortions. We employ states' regulatory rules in an instrumental variable estimation and a border discontinuity design to show insurers do not adjust rates in highly regulated states and compensate by raising rates in less regulated states. Rates and risks diverge in the long run, distorting cross-state risk-sharing and increasing insurer exits from highly regulated states. We argue these patterns stem from the interactions between rate regulation and insurers' financing constraints.
Egress thresholds and wildfire fatalities
Caitlin Fong et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 9 June 2026
Abstract:
Avoiding human fatalities during wildfires is a key public policy objective. Outward road access, or the number of egress routes, is widely assumed to influence wildfire fatalities, yet few studies have quantified if or when this factor becomes critical. To address this gap, we assembled a dataset on community-level wildfire fatality counts and combined it with nationally consistent community egress for the United States, finding that cumulative fatalities are sharply concentrated in communities with very few exits, declining steeply to roughly six nonresidential roads, beyond which additional routes confer minimal further risk reduction. Extending this analysis nationally, we mapped all small communities (<50,000 residents) to identify geographic confluence of limited egress and high wildfire hazard, highlighting regions where road constraints could directly amplify fatalities. Across the United States, 17.7 million people live in communities below this critical egress threshold, including 2.5 million in high wildfire hazard areas. Although most high-risk communities are in the western United States, unexpected hotspots appear in Oklahoma, Florida, and Hawai'i. As wildfire hazard continues to expand with climate change, fuel accumulation, and development in the wildland-urban interface, even more communities may be at risk. Targeted investment in road infrastructure, improved evacuation communication and preparedness, and development of preplanned refuge options together offer complementary and actionable pathways to reduce wildfire fatalities and build nationwide resilience.
Asian immigrants, school quality, and the U.S. housing market
Amanda Ang, Eunjee Kwon & Siqi Zheng
Journal of Urban Economics, May 2026
Abstract:
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.
Measuring Housing Quality Using Revealed Preference: A Geographic PageRank Approach
Alex Bell, Sophie Calder-Wang & Shusheng Zhong
NBER Working Paper, June 2026
Abstract:
This paper introduces Geographic PageRank (GPR), an innovative measure of place quality that is based on migration decisions, employing a recursive algorithm that leverages the full network of migration flows. Using various public data sources, we construct GPR rankings for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas. We also extend the rankings to capture changes over time and differences for population subgroups, providing a versatile data product. As an application, we show that GPR can serve as an "anti-instrument'' for unobserved housing quality when pricing environmental amenities, recovering a correctly signed implicit price of air pollution that is in line with quasi-experimental benchmarks.