Tom Cui

Taming the Growth Machine: The Long-Run Consequences of Federal Urban Planning Assistance (Job Market Paper, with Bressler)

2025-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Abstract

We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized growing communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. Using newly digitized records merged with panel data across municipalities on housing and zoning outcomes, we exploit eligibility thresholds and capacity to approve funds across state agencies to identify effects. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20\% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability.

Are Zoning District Borders Color Lines? How Lot Size Requirements Alter Neighborhood Racial Composition (with Been)

2024-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Joint with Vicki Been (NYU)

Abstract

We study how minimum lot size (MLS) requirements affected the racial composition of neighborhoods since 1980. We generate a new database of the borders within local governments where we predict changes in lot size requirements. Applying dynamic border discontinuity designs over the national database, we produce causal estimates that vary over the regulations' particular characteristics. Data-driven clustering identifies which of the regulations most impact racial diversity: MLS requirements that are at least 5000 square feet larger than prevailing density patterns nearby, lowering allowed density by 3 units/acre. Our results show that those requirements persistently stymied racial integration over the following decades.

Did Race Fence Off The American City? The Great Migration and the Evolution of Exclusionary Zoning

2022-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Abstract

I study how postwar Black migration caused American cities' suburbs to widely restrict development with minimum lot sizes. When local governments use lot size regulations to restrict the supply of dense housing, bunching is detectable across lot size distributions. I develop an algorithm to measure bunching and produce a national panel for the regulation spanning the 20th Century. Most suburbs adopted lot size controls from 1945--1970, all the while Black Americans left the South for economic opportunity. I find the Great Migration of Black Americans into non-Southern cities accelerated minimum lot size adoption and caused up to half of baseline lot size restrictiveness. Migration of poorer white Americans cause null or small negative effects. A sizable driver of the Great Migration effect is local implementation of school desegregation before 1970. The results support a theory where competition in policy planning still reinforced a minority group's exclusion from local public goods. As homes remain in place longer than their first owners, past lot size restrictiveness can explain today's spatial disparities in racial sorting and economic mobility.

Stimulating Durable Purchases (with Berger, Turner, Zwick)

2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Joint with David Berger, Nicholas Turner and Eric Zwick

Latest draft

Abstract

This paper uses a benchmark life-cycle model with incomplete markets and durable consumption as a laboratory to investigate the design of fiscal stimulus. We calibrate the model to match microdata moments from standard sources, administrative data on homeownership transitions, and quasi-experimental estimates from the First-Time Homebuyer Credit in the U.S. We present three results. First, frictions that limit agents' ability to smooth durable purchases over time are crucial to reconciling competing empirical findings. With liquidity constraints and fixed adjustment costs, the standard real-business-cycle intuition that responses should quickly reverse no longer holds. A first-time homebuying subsidy that can be applied to the down payment induces a response that persists over many years. This persistence arises because the subsidy enables young, constrained agents to transition to homeownership several years earlier than they otherwise would have and because homes are a better store of value than other durables. Second, whereas in standard models the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of cash transfers declines rapidly with the size of a cash transfer, we find a much slower decline in our baseline model, with durable goods adjustments driving the result. Finally, we combine the model with techniques from the public finance literature to assess welfare implications of alternative durable stimulus and cash transfers. Large fiscal or welfare spillovers are necessary for targeted durable subsidies to match the benefits of unconditional cash transfers.

Measuring Pro-housing Reforms at Scale

2022-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Released version (Mercatus link)

Abstract

To increase housing supply and housing affordability across the United States, state and local governments have started experimenting with a menu of pro- housing reforms. If politicians and planners adopt certain reforms, how can they best monitor their effectiveness at providing affordable housing? This paper outlines how those practitioners can use data for housing policy evalu- ation, from determining what to study to understanding the research methods used by outside experts. To illustrate recommendations, I use frontier empirical research in urban economics and recent data collection successes by government agencies. This paper offers a standardized reform evaluation plan that can speed up the production of knowledge about which reforms work in different market conditions.

Housing Segments and Segmented Remodeling

2022-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Major revision in progress; please e-mail for the latest draft

Abstract

In 2019, home remodeling and improvement accounted for over $400 billion in annual U.S. investment. I show that this sizable investment in remodeling is also segmented investment: investment concentrates in the right tail of major remodels. Households making major remodels live in higher-quality homes within a housing market, as defined by their self-reported home values. Preliminary results show remodeling is both procyclical and price elastic, but that price elasticities vary between households with different mortgage payment-to-income ratios. A rise in house price indices by one percent raises remodeling propensities as much as a percentage point rise in leverage decreases them. These facts suggest credit markets play a key role in directing remodeling activity toward providing affordable housing stock and not toward properties held for investment purposes.

Teaching Experience

2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Teaching fellow for Wharton courses:

REAL 208/708: Housing Markets
Spring 2020–Spring 2022

Details

This course is designed for students interested in the economics and operations of housing markets. It is primarily a U.S. focused course, but does include a limited amount of international material for comparative purposes. The class is divided into four sections: (1) supply and demand for housing, including the operations of homebuilders and rental landlords; (2) house prices, including cycles and price dynamics; (3) international comparisons; and (4) public policy analysis applied to a current housing markets-related issue.

MGEC 611/612: Microeconomics For Managers
Fall 2018–Fall 2021

Details

(611) This course establishes the micro-economic foundations for understanding business decision-making. The course will cover consumer theory and market demand, production theory, perfectly competitive and monopoly markets and game theory.
(612) This course will cover the economic foundations of business strategy and decision-making in market environments with other strategic actors and less than full information, as well as advanced pricing strategies.

BEPP 230: Urban Fiscal Policy
Fall 2019

Details

This course will examine the provision of public services for firms and people through cities. Why cities exist, when fiscal policy fails, investments in infrastructure, realities of local governments such as inequality, crime, corruption, high cost of living, congestion, and unfunded pensions and debt, will be covered. We will pay special attention to recent topics, such as partnerships with the private sector, enterprise zones, the role of technology, environmental challenges, and real estate policies that promote housing affordability, such as rent control and inclusionary zoning.