Felipe Barbieri

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. My research is in industrial organization and urban economics, focusing on housing and transportation.

My Job Market Paper explores the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing in the United States.

I am advised by Aviv Nevo, Juan Camilo Castillo, and Gilles Duranton.

Working Papers

1. Market Power and the Welfare Effects of Institutional Landlords
   Job Market Paper, Draft Coming Soon
   (with Greg Dobbels)
   Abstract

   In the last decade, large financial institutions in the United States have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals. This paper studies the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing. We build an equilibrium model of the housing market with two sectors: rental and homeownership. The model captures two key forces from institutional purchases of homes: changes in rental concentration and reallocation of housing stock across sectors. To estimate the model, we construct a novel dataset of individual homes in metropolitan Atlanta, identifying institutional owners of each house and scraping daily prices, rents, vacancies, web page views, and customer contacts from Zillow. We quantify the extent and the sources of market power in the rental sector. We then counterfactually assess equilibrium effects of policies such as a ban on institutional landlords.

2. Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago
   R&R, Econometrica
   (with Milena Almagro, Juan Camilo Castillo, Nathaniel Hickok, and Tobias Salz)
   Abstract | PDF | Supplementary Material

   We characterize and quantify optimal urban transportation policies in the presence of congestion and environmental externalities. We formulate a framework in which a municipal government chooses among transportation equilibria through its choice of public transit policies—prices and frequencies—as well as road pricing. The government faces a budget constraint that introduces monopoly-like distortions and the potential need to cross-subsidize modes. We apply this framework to Chicago, for which we construct a new dataset that comprehensively captures transportation choices. We find that road pricing alone leads to large welfare gains by reducing externalities, but at the expense of travelers, whose surplus falls even if road pricing revenues are fully rebated. The optimal public transit price is near zero, with reduced bus and increased train frequencies. Combining transit policies with road pricing slackens the budget constraint, allowing for higher transit frequencies and lower prices, thereby increasing consumer surplus after rebates.

Selected Work in Progress

• Optimal Rental Assistance and Homelessness in Market Equilibrium
  (with Olivia Diaz Gilbert and Keunsang Song)

• Estimating Labor Market Power using Job Vacancy Duration Data: Evidence from France
  (with Thomas Le Barbanchon)