Working Papers
Do Housing Supply Skeptics Learn? Evidence from Economics and Advocacy Treatments.
Abstract: Recent research finds that most people want lower housing prices but, contrary to expert consensus, do not believe that more supply would lower prices. This study tests the effects of four informational interventions on Americans’ beliefs about housing markets and associated policy preferences and political actions (writing to state lawmakers). Several of the interventions significantly and positively affected economic understanding and support for land-use liberaliza- tion, with standardized effect sizes of 0.15 − 0.3. The most impactful treatment—an educational video from an advocacy group—had effects 2-3 times larger than typical economics-information or political-messaging treatments. Learning about housing markets increased support for development among homeowners as much as renters, contrary to the “homevoter hypothesis.” The treatments did not significantly affect the probability of writing to lawmakers, but an off-plan analysis suggests that the advocacy video increased the number of messages asking for more market-rate housing.
Single Family Schoolyards: Residential Zoning and School Segregation.
Abstract: Though the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed explicit segregation of public schools, segregation has remained stubbornly persistent in the intervening decades. What explains continuous racial segregation in the absence of explicit policy? One possible driver is America’s built environment designed with similar segregationist impulses but not subject to the same corrective legal action. Zoning and land use policy influence where households of different means can live, thereby sorting their children across schools. We investigate this link drawing on housing unit counts from the American Community Survey, apportioned to 923 school district boundaries and 13,002 school attendance zones with 27 million residential parcels. We find that districts where single-family and multifamily housing is spread unevenly across attendance zones are more segregated by race and income. Schools with attendance zones that contain a higher proportion of single-family detached residences enroll a disproportionately high share of Asian and White students, as compared with their districts. When an attendance zone boundary is redrawn to encompass a higher share of single-family housing, its Asian and White share increases further. These findings help illuminate how land use policy influences educational segregation and contributes to literature on how policies that regulate the built environment affect racial sorting.
The Noisy Neighbor Effect: How Negative Advertising in One State Influences Viewers Next Door.
Abstract: The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC unlocked a flood of new political advertising at all levels of government, leaving voters to decipher an unprecedented level of information before eventually casting their ballots. How competent are voters at sorting through all this information and shaping opinions based on relevant information? I exploit variations in state-election law and the timing of gubernatorial races to create a natural experiment on how seemingly irrelevant information can shape voter attitudes. I find that, all else equal, those living in multi-state media markets who were exposed to negative television ads for a gubernatorial race taking place in a neighboring state were more disapproving of their own governors than other residents of their state. This same exposure to out-of-state gubernatorial ads also led residents to rate their own governor’s as more ideologically distant from them. In a saturated era of political information–with a portion of it coming from active misinformation campaigns–the ability of voters to sift through and accurately process political messaging is vital to the function of democracy. These results call that ability into question and raise new implications for the regulation of political advertising in American elections.
Buying the Ballot: Political Actors and Official Ballot Initiative Language with Mitch Downey, Economics, Stockholm IIES.
Abstract: At the time of their inception in the Progressive Era, ballot initiatives were intended as a way for citizens to wrest control of the policy making process away from politicians corrupted by special interests. However, this measure of popular sovereignty may not be as immune to meddling these same special interests as either the founders of direct democracy or the literature suggests. Many voters learn about initiatives only from the titles and summaries appearing on ballots, which are themselves written by elected politicians. We study that special interest groups influence the wording of these official ballot initiative summaries, showing that summaries are more likely to use supporters’ preferred language as supporters contributed more to the summary writer. This relationship holds true even when the summary writer is running for a different office and does not exist in summaries written by an independent, apolitical non-profit group. We then show that donors are more likely to give to Attorney General candidates when relevant initiatives appear on the ballot. This result is not reflected in broader state-level political activity and exists only in states where the Attorney General writes the summary. Our results show the risks of tasking elected officials with fundamentally bureaucratic tasks and indicate that this process designed to reduce the power of special interests over the legislative process may have actually given them another avenue of control.