Evan Soltas on the job market from MIT

Here is his home page, the job market paper is “Tax incentives and the supply of low income housing”:

Subsidies to developers are a core instrument of housing policy. How do they affect housing markets, and who benefits? I assess their impacts and incidence with a dynamic model of housing markets and new data on developers competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. I estimate the model using three sources of variation: quasi-random assignment of subsidies, shocks to subsidy generosity, and nonlinearities in scoring rules for subsidy applications. I find that, due to displacement of unsubsidized housing, subsidies add few net units to the housing stock and instead reallocate units progressively. Households benefit from developer competition for subsidies, but competition also results in high entry costs, and developers still capture nearly half of the welfare gains. In counterfactuals, a stylized voucher program can generate the same household benefits at less fiscal cost.

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