Economics

Ph.D.
University of Illinois at Chicago
1999

B.S.

Mining Engineering
Middle East Technical University
1987

Professor of Economics

Urban Economics III

A PhD level courses that covers advanced Urban Economics topics

PhD Dissertation

Advising PhD students specialized in Urban Economics.

Homestead Tax Deductions and Home Values: The Case of Washington DC Versus Maryland

Homestead Tax Deductions and Home Values: The Case of Washington DC Versus Maryland

In Washington DC, homeowners benefit from a generous homestead property tax deduction, which significantly reduces their property tax burden. This deduction specifically exempts a substantial portion of home assessment values from taxation. To understand the causal effects of this policy on home values, this article examines the impact of an increase in DC homestead tax deductions. The increase was implemented as a policy decision to index the homestead deduction to the Consumer Price Index starting from 2013. In the absence of a comparable property tax policy change in Maryland around the relevant years, we utilize this policy based natural experiment and compare the home value increases in the census tracts along the DC-Maryland border. Our findings reveal that this policy led to an economically and statistically significant increase in estimated home value in DC tracts compared to neighboring tracts in Maryland. Moreover, our results indicate that this effect is even more pronounced in neighborhoods with a majority Black population, thereby highlighting the potential redistributive implications of such tax policies.

An Empirical Analysis of HBCU Attendance on Black Student's Graduation Rates

An Empirical Analysis of HBCU Attendance on Black Student's Graduation Rates

This research examines the benefits of attending HBCUs vs PWI for black college students. Using a College Board Data set merged with National Student Clearing House data this paper finds that there is an increase in the likelihood of graduating with a bachelor's degree for black students attending an HBCU. Additionally, when comparing only those students who graduate, HBCUs are more likely to produce a black STEM graduate.

The Growth of Local Education Transfers

The Growth of Local Education Transfers: Explaining How Older Households Have Supported Schools

We argue that previous research studying the relationship between a growing elderly population and local support for public education has overlooked a key component to public education finance: redistribution payments made by older households. A fuller accounting of these payments indicates that a growing elderly population might very well prove to be a boon to local public school students not a burden as has been previously suggested. Beginning with a national sample of suburban school districts, this article shows that a higher elderly to student ratio within a district actually increases per-student revenues, even after accounting for the downward pressure that older households place on tax rates. We then explore a specific channel through which elderly households redistribute resources to school-age children: local property taxes.

Are inclusionary housing programs color-blind?

Are inclusionary housing programs color-blind? The case of Montgomery County MPDU program

Relying on exhaustive administrative data spanned over four decades, this paper studies the treatment of African American applicants by the Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit (MPDU) program in Montgomery County, MD. We show that this program was equally accessible to African-American applicants, except between 1995 and 2000, when African Americans’ conditional probability of purchasing a home through the program was lowered by 10% compared to that of other applicants, maybe as a temporary response to the sudden surge in African American applicants that occurred at that time, even though we cannot rule out that this may also have reflected changes in applicant behavior.

Small homes, public schools, and property tax capitalization

Small homes, public schools, and property tax capitalization

Efforts to estimate the degree to which local property taxes are capitalized into house values are complicated by any spurious correlation between property taxes and unobserved public services. We sidestep the problem of omitted or misspecified measures of school quality by focusing on a segment of the housing market that likely places little-to-no value on school quality: small homes. Because few households residing in small homes have public school children, we anticipate that variations in their value do not account for differentials in public school quality. Using restricted-access microdata provided by the U.S. Census, and a quasi-experimental identification strategy, we estimate that local property taxes are nearly fully capitalized into the prices of small homes.