Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2025); vol. 238, 107231
Previously Agents and Gender Gaps in Negotiation
Abstract: Oftentimes people delegate negotiation to others (i.e., “agents’’) , whether formally or informally. This paper explores the impact of agents on gender differences in negotiation and how this varies with common incentive structures. Using a bargaining experiment with over 2,400 subjects, we find that, absent agents, males make more aggressive demands than females. Introducing agents who negotiate on behalf of the players entirely closes this gap. Although agent incentives affect overall aggressiveness, they do not induce gender gaps. Belief elicitations suggest that this is because agents underestimate reservation prices for both males and females and incorrectly believe that they have the same threshold for rewarding aggressive behavior. While males and females have similar expected outcomes, agents close a risk exposure gap by making proposals across genders that are equally likely to be accepted.
Household Mobility, Networks, and Gentrification of Minority Neighborhoods in the US, with Fernando Ferreira and Benjamin Smith
Journal of Labor Economics (2024); vol. 42, issue S1, pp. S61-S94.
Abstract: We investigate the impact of recent gentrification shocks on minority neighborhoods in the 50 largest US labor markets. We show that household moves from a given neighborhood are concentrated to few destinations with similar minority shares and strong network ties, but those neighborhoods are farther away from downtown. Gentrification affects Black neighborhoods by raising house prices, reducing the proportion of Black households, and increasing the share of movers going to neighborhoods with network ties. However, gentrification has negligible effects on Hispanic neighborhoods. Overall labor market area segregation decreases after a gentrification shock because highly Black neighborhoods become less segregated.
Real Estate Economics (2021); vol. 94, issue S1, pp. 134-168.
Abstract: Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year. In addition to preventing fraudulent transactions, an important benefit of appraisals when they report a value below the contract price is that they help borrowers renegotiate prices with sellers. However, appraised values are rarely below the purchase contract price: Some 30% of appraisals in our sample are exactly at the home price (with less than 10% of them below it). We construct a simple but intuitive model to explain how appraisers’ incentives within the institutional framework that governs mortgage lending lead to information loss in appraisals (i.e., appraisals set equal to the contract price). We also present new empirical findings relevant to the issue of appraisal accuracy, based on analysis of appraisal and contract price data and analysis of mortgage default patterns. One new finding—that the frequency of appraisal equal to contract price increases at the loan-to-value boundaries (notches) typical of mortgage pricing schedules—is, in fact, implied by our model. In addition, consistent with information loss or, more broadly, with the view that appraisals often artificially confirm the contract price, we find that mortgages with appraised value equal to the contract price are more likely to default.
Previously Market Concentration, Labor Quality, and Efficiency: Evidence from Barriers in the Real Estate Industry
Link to most recent version; Link to SSRN
Abstract: How does the size and composition of an intermediary pool affect the markets it serves? I provide causal evidence in residential real estate, where brokers constitute only 20% of the licensed workforce yet intermediate every transaction. Using a novel panel of licensees, I exploit a Texas reform that unintentionally generated a 73% anticipatory surge in broker entry that expanded the medium-term supply by 8%. Despite increasing the salesperson stock by 6%, the expanded managerial pool generated no gains in transaction volume, prices, or liquidity, consistent with rent extraction over a fixed transaction flow rather than improved allocative efficiency.
Abstract: This paper studies how public sector collective bargaining affects contemporaneous public pension financing. I compile a new Collective Bargaining Laws Database and construct a pension plan panel spanning 1957–2022. Using staggered-adoption difference-in-differences estimators, I find that collective bargaining legalization reduces employee contributions and increases the government (i.e., taxpayer) share of pension financing. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity. General employee plans experience higher government contributions, lower employee contributions, and a larger government financing share, while protective service plans exhibit only lower employee contributions and teacher plans show no significant effects. Collective bargaining legalization, therefore, reshapes public pension financing incidence.
Abstract: Many assets are costly to liquidate because trade requires search and coordination with potential buyers. Intermediaries can reduce these frictions, but the effort through which they do so is rarely observed. We study this problem in residential real estate, a large illiquid asset market in which brokers are central to the transaction process. We measure intermediary effort using the universe of open-house events in the Washington, DC metropolitan area from 2018-2024 and link each event to listing histories, agent identifiers, property characteristics, and transaction outcomes. Open-house effort behaves like purposeful, costly intermediary input: it rises with expected commission dollars and local buyer demand, falls with agent workload, and is concentrated when buyers are most available. Instrumental-variable estimates based on prior-agent open-house propensities and prior-agent availability show that this open-house-centered effort margin increases the probability of sale within 30 days by roughly 17 percentage points, with no robust evidence of price gains. Spillover IV estimates suggest that nearby effort may reduce focal-listing liquidity, consistent with buyer-attention congestion rather than positive shopping externalities.