Assistant Professor of Real Estate

Research


  1. Estimating Ethnic Preferences Using Ethnic Housing Quotas in Singapore. Revise and resubmit, Review of Economic Studies.
    Abstract: This paper estimates people’s taste for living with own-ethnic-group neighbors using variation from a natural experiment in Singapore: ethnic housing quotas. I develop a location choice model that informs the use of policy variation from the quotas to address endogeneity issues well-known in the social interactions literature. I assembled a dataset on neighborhood level ethnic proportions by matching 589,000 names in the phonebook to ethnicities. I find that all groups like own-ethnic-group neighbors. Interestingly, the Chinese majority exhibit inverted U-shaped preferences so that once a neighborhood has enough Chinese neighbors, they would rather add a new neighbor from other groups.
  2. Estimating the Impact of an Ethnic Housing Quotas Policy in Singapore. Revise and resubmit, Journal of Public Economics.
    Abstract: Many desegregation policies take the form of quotas. This paper studies the impact of the ethnic housing quotas in Singapore that were designed to encourage residential desegregation amongst the three major ethnic groups, the Chinese, Malays and the Indians. I estimate the impact of the Chinese, Malay and Indian quotas on the price, quantity and quality of units sold. I find that all quotas significantly decrease the proportion of units sold. Malay-constrained units are 5% cheaper perhaps because the units sold are also of lower quality. The impact on the price and quality of Chinese- and Indian-constrained units are opposite. Chinese-constrained units are 7% more expensive even though the units sold are of significantly worse quality. Indian-constrained units are 2% cheaper even though the units sold are of a higher quality.  I show that selection effects cannot fully account for these discontinuities.
  3. The Relationship between Marginal Willingness-to-Pay in the Hedonic and Discrete Choice Models. Submitted.

    Abstract:     Willingness-to-pay is important for welfare analysis. The two primary approaches to estimate marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for differentiated goods are hedonics (Rosen, 1974) and discrete choice models (McFadden, 1974). For many years, researchers have alluded to the apparent duality between both models. The innovation in this paper is to show that the hedonic MWTP can be written as a function of choice probabilities in the discrete choice model. I find that the hedonic method estimates a weighted average of marginal utilities where higher weights are associated with consumer types whose choice probabilities indicate a high variance regarding their choice (marginal consumers). This variance decreases as choice probabilities approach 0 or 1. Therefore, the hedonic method gives more weight to the preferences of the marginal consumer relative to the discrete choice approach. We can use these probability weights to analyze how MWTP in the discrete choice model differs from MWTP in the hedonic model.

  4. Improving Educational Quality through Enhancing Community Participation: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment in Indonesia, joint with Menno Pradhan, Daniel Suryadarma, Amanda Beatty, Arya Gaduh, Rima Prama Artha, World Bank Working Paper.

    Abstract: This study evaluates the effect of four randomized interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to treatment groups receiving a grant plus one or a combination of three interventions: training for school committee members, a democratic election of school committee members, or facilitated collaboration between the school committee and the village council, also called linkage.  Nearly two years after implementation, we find that measures to reinforce existing school committee structures, the grant and training interventions, demonstrate limited or no effects; while measures that foster outside ties between the school committee and other parties, linkage and election, lead to greater engagement by education stakeholders and in turn to learning. We see test score improvements in Indonesian by 0.17 standard deviations for linkage and 0.22 standard deviations for linakage+election.  The election intervention leads to changes in time household members accompany children studying per week, but this does not lead to learning.  Linkage is the most cost effective intervention, causing  a 0.13 change in standard deviation in Indonesian test scores for each 100 USD spent.

  5. Seasonal Food Consumption in West Timor, joint with Karna Basu.
    Abstract: Seasonality is a basic fact of agrarian life in many developing countries. In this paper, we complement the literature on consumption smoothing by focusing on the less-studied problem of smoothing between seasons within an agricultural cycle. We present a novel model that relates seasonality in consumption to exponential and quasi-hyperbolic time preferences. The model identifies two crucial parameters for consumption patterns - discount factors and crop depreciation rates. Motivated by the model, we collected a unique dataset that combined time preference measures with detailed consumption and production information of more than 2000 households in Eastern Indonesia. We relate the model to the data and find suggestive evidence that both time preferences and crop depreciation rates play a role in the seasonality of consumption patterns. Based on these findings, we propose simple solutions that will be tested in future research.


    6. Evaluating seasonal food security programs in East Indonesia, joint with Karna Basu. Here is the online appendix.

    Abstract: In this paper, we analyze consumption and income seasonality in West Timor. We design a unique seasonal household panel, develop a model to explain how credit and saving constraints generate seasonality, and present results from a randomized experiment of food storage and food credit. Under credit, participants report a reduction in both seasonal consumption gaps and food shortage, increases in economic well-being, and health improvements when credit is disbursed but deterioration when repayments are due. Under storage, households with a high propensity to save report a reduction in food shortages and an increase in economic well-being. 


Work In Progress

  1. Commercial Real Estate Debt, joint with Joe Gyourko.