Job Market Paper

1. “Credit Constraints and Bias in Hedonic Amenity Valuations.” 2021.

   I demonstrate that credit constraints bias price-based (cf. rent-based) hedonic valuations of local public amenities. Mis-measurement of the private value of local public amenities distorts welfare analysis and could cause under-investment in amenities. I introduce a method to measure this bias by applying the hedonic framework to a problem of mortgage choice in the presence of credit constraints. I use Fannie Mae pricing grids and private mortgage-insurance requirements to construct borrower-level mortgage choice menus and estimate the extent of bias among fixed-rate agency loan borrowers. I find evidence that traditional hedonic techniques understate the value of amenities by ~50pp.

Working Papers

1. “The LTV Elasticity of Housing Demand: Evidence from Bunching in FHA Borrowing.” 2021.

   I adapt the bunching framework to measure the loan-to-value elasticity of housing demand. Unlike existing literature, my estimator can identify the effect of credit supply while remaining agnostic about how households form beliefs over future housing returns. I measure a statistically significant elasticity of demand, suggesting that households are credit constrained at the time of home purchase. The elasticity is economically small, ~14-25bp, suggesting that shocks to credit supply drove housing demand largely through the channel of household beliefs.

2. “Housing Wealth Management at Retirement.” 2019.

   I instrument retirement with programmatic Social Security eligibility thresholds and find that retirement makes a household ~12pp more likely to issue any new mortgage debt and ~3pp more likely to extract equity from a home within the following two years. The transaction costs associated with refinancing and the predictability of retirement suggest that households may save excessive funds in housing wealth relative to a rational benchmark.

3. “Decision-Making by Precedent and the Founding of American Honda (1949-1972).” With Ramon Casadesus-Masanell. 2016.

   We review archival documents and conduct a novel oral history to document that Kihachiro Kawashima, President of American Honda from 1959 to 1965, made decisions according to precedent set by his boss and mentor, chief strategist of Honda, Takeo Fujisawa. We argue that decision-making by precedent represents neither ‘deliberate’ nor ‘emergent’ strategy because it is characterized by intentions of upper-management that are neither present nor absent but fictive. We propose and define an alternative: ‘subjunctive’ strategy.