RECENT AND IN PROGRESS

Peter Christensen
Lewis Lehe
Adam Osman

Ridehailing and the ‘First/Last Mile’ Challenge in Public Transit: Experimental Evidence from a Ride-2-Connect Program.
(New: Research in Progress)

Cities have begun experimenting with bundling ride-hailing with mass transit services to increase access and address the ‘first mile/last mile' problem, which is widely considered a grand challenge for the transportation sector. We study the effects of randomly assigned subsidies for ride-hail to transit (R2T) services in a large sample of riders in the Chicago Metropolitan Region, measuring impacts on travel behavior using trip-level data extracted from participant mobile phones. We examine direct impacts on substitution away from private vehicles and increases in public transit utilization for transit stranded subpopulations and build a structural model to simulate the potential effects of a citywide program on congestion/emissions externalities.

Sébastien Box-Couillard
Peter Christensen

Racial Housing Price Differentials in the U.S. Housing Market
(New: Research in Progress)

We report evidence from the largest study of racial price differentials in the U.S. housing market, constructing a panel of repeat sales that includes approximately 43 million unique transactions between 2000-2020. We find that while price premiums facing Black and Hispanic home buyers are virtually ubiquitous in U.S. markets, there is substantial heterogeneity in their magnitude across geography and time. Analysis of the mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity reveals evidence of important interactions with seller race: non-white buyers tend to purchase properties at a discount from a seller from the same racial/ethnic group, but purchase at a premium when transacting with a seller from a different group. Leveraging exogenous variation in racial segregation introduced by the historical placement of railroad tracks, we find that residential segregation arising at the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century has a strong effect on price premiums paid by Black home buyers during the period 2000-2020. A one S.D. reduction in the level of a city's segregation would almost entirely eliminate the price premium for Black homebuyers.

Peter Christensen
Paul Francisco
Erica Myers

Incentive Pay and Social Returns to Worker Effort in Public Programs: Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program
(New: Working Paper)

Abstract: Aligning compensation with recipient outcomes has the potential to improve the efficiency of government programs. We perform a field experiment to evaluate the impact of performance bonuses on the returns to spending in a large low-income energy efficiency assistance program. We find that performance-based bonuses dramatically increased program natural gas savings by 24%. The bonuses generate $5.39-$14.53 in social benefits for every dollar invested and increase the social net benefits from home-level weatherization more than two-fold. Contractors performing at high quality at baseline respond disproportionately to the incentives, suggesting that gains in the program's cost-effectiveness result from more efficient allocation of worker effort across workers who differ in their marginal effort cost. We do not find evidence of learning within the two-year study period or of increased deficiencies among non-incentivized tasks.

Peter Christensen
Paul Francisco
Erica Myers
Hansen Shao
Mateus Souza

Machine Learning can Increase the Impact of Energy Efficiency Programs (Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Public Economics)

Building energy efficiency has been a cornerstone of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies for decades. However, impact evaluations have revealed that energy savings typically fall short of engineering model forecasts that currently guide funding decisions. This creates a resource allocation problem that impedes progress on climate change. Using data from the largest U.S. energy efficiency program, we demonstrate that a data-driven approach to predicting retrofit impacts based on previously realized outcomes is more accurate than the status quo engineering models. Targeting high-return interventions based on these predictions dramatically increases net social benefits, from $0.93 to $1.23 per dollar invested.

Peter Christensen
Ignacio Sarmiento
Chris Timmins

Racial Discrimination and Housing Outcomes in the United States Rental Market (Under Review)

We report evidence from the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market, encompassing 50 major cities in the U.S. The study reveals that African American and Hispanic/LatinX renters continue to face discriminatory constraints in most metropolitan markets, though we find a low correlation in constraints facing the two groups even in a uniform sample of listings. Discriminatory constraints are stronger in cities with higher levels of residential segregation and, for African American renters, correlate with persistent gaps in income mobility. Finally, we find that discriminatory constraints detected in a correspondence experiment predict rental housing outcomes.

Peter Christensen
Chris Timmins

The Damages and Distortions from Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market (Accepted, Quarterly Journal of Economics)

We report evidence from the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market, encompassing 50 major cities in the U.S. The study reveals that African American and Hispanic/LatinX renters continue to face discriminatory constraints in most metropolitan markets, though we find a low correlation in constraints facing the two groups even in a uniform sample of listings. Discriminatory constraints are stronger in cities with higher levels of residential segregation and, for African American renters, correlate with persistent gaps in income mobility. Finally, we find that discriminatory constraints detected in a correspondence experiment predict rental housing outcomes.

Peter Christensen
Adam Osman

The Demand for Mobility: Evidence from an Experiment with Uber Riders (Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy)

Optimal transportation policies depend on demand elasticities that interact across modes and vary across the population, but understanding how and why these elasticities vary has been an empirical challenge. Using an experiment with Uber in Egypt, we randomly assign large price discounts for transport services over a 3 month period to examine: (1) the demand for ride-hailing services and (2) the demand for total mobility (km/week). A 50% discount more than quadruples Uber usage and induces an increase of nearly 49% in total mobility. These effects are stronger for women, who are less mobile at baseline and perceive public transit as unsafe. Technology-induced reductions in the price of ride-hailing services could generate substantial consumer surplus through combined mobility effects ($12 Billion PPP) but would be accompanied by considerable increases in external costs ($3.2 Billion PPP) resulting from increases in private vehicle travel.