One of the main advantages of cloud computing is that it helps the users to save money: instead of buying a lot of computers to cover all their computations, the user can rent the computation time on the cloud to cover the rare peak spikes of computer need. From this viewpoint, it is important to find the optimal division between in-house and in-the-cloud computations. In this paper, we solve t...

Through a longitudinal survival analysis, this paper provides the first look into the long-term process of nest leaving, which is a pre-condition for natural household formation by young adults. Using the American Housing Survey (AHS) data to follow a group of young adults aged 25-34 who were living in parental homes in 1985, we found that nearly 23 percent still lived in parental homes by 1995...

Advocates of rent control often argue that rent control aids the mixing of rich and poor, and perhaps of the races as well. Economic theory does not necessarily predict that rent control will reduce segregation. The best case for rent control as an aid to integration is that it creates pockets of low rent (and low quality) apartments in expensive cities. However, by creating an excess of demand...

How do pandemics affect urban housing markets? This paper studies historical outbreaks of the plague in 17th-century Amsterdam and cholera 19th-century Paris to answer this question. Based on micro-level transaction data, we show resulted large declines house prices, smaller rent prices. We find particularly reductions prices during first six months an epidemic, heavily-affected areas. However,...

Rent-seeking models have been used to predict and explain a wide variety of political decisions. This paper extends Tullock’s classic rent-seeking model to the case of a risky rent, where the winner of the rent-seeking contest does not receive the rent for sure, but only probabilistically. We derive the equilibrium and comparative static predictions from our extended model and present the resul...

The establishment of a tradable permit market requires the regulator to select a level of aggregate emissions and then distribute the associated permits to specific groups. Both these decisions create opportunities for rent seeking. In this paper, we use a contest model to analyse the incentives to rent seek for pollution permits and to analyse the consequences for social welfare. We find diffe...

The first chapter consists of my job-market paper. The foreclosure rate of subprime mortgages increased markedly across 2003-2007 borrower cohorts-subprime mortgages originated in 20062007 were roughly three times more likely to default within three years of origination than mortgages originated in 2003-2004. Many have argued that this surge in subprime defaults represents a deterioration in su...

Between 1999 and 2006, there were two episodes during which inflation in the Rent index in the CPI diverged markedly from inflation in the index for Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER); early in 2007, these series began to diverge again. Such divergence often prompts many to question CPI methods. A key difference between these two series is that OER indexes are based upon rents which have received a ...

We consider a rent control regime where rent increases on, and eviction of, a sitting tenant are not allowed. However when an apartment becomes vacant the landlord is free to negotiate a new rent. We argue that this stylized system is a good (though polar) approximation for many rent control regimes existent today in several U.S. cities and the world over. Under such a regime, if inflation exis...