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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.

I am on the 2024-25 Academic Job Market. [CV] - kupf@sas.upenn.edu

Working Papers

  1. Market Power and the Welfare Effects of Institutional Landlords
    Job Market Paper
    (with Gregory Dobbels)
    Abstract | PDF

    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 house-level daily prices, rents, vacancies, web page views, and customer contacts from Zillow. We find that institutional acquisitions increase average renter welfare by $2,760 per year (with rents decreasing by 2.3%). This net benefit reflects two opposing effects: higher concentration raises rents by 3.8%, but higher rental supply lowers rents by 6.1%. On the other hand, the welfare of the average homebuyer decreases by $49,950. On the supply side, institutional acquisitions benefit house sellers but harm the average landlord.

  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)
    Abstract | Slides available upon request

    We study the determinants of homelessness and characterize optimal rental assistance policies for its prevention. We use four years of panel data on 1,682 individuals in Australia at risk of homelessness. The data allows us to track transitions across levels of housing insecurity, such as entry and exit from homelessness, and to observe hundreds of individual characteristics such as employment, income, partner income, and social networks. We begin by addressing the causal relationship between poverty and homelessness, and show that temporary and chronic homelessness differ in several dimensions. Individuals with prolonged and repeated homelessness spells tend to have lower incomes than those with shorter spells. Event studies reveal that short spells are often preceded by sharp income declines and followed by a rapid recovery, while long spells show no temporal income pattern. We quantify the extent to which homelessness spells affect future income. Finally, we build a dynamic discrete choice model for low-income rental housing demand, and use it to simulate the equilibrium effects of varying rental assistance levels.

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