Paul E. Carrillo

An Empirical Stationary Equilibrium Search Model of the Housing Market

This article specifies and estimates a computationally tractable stationary equilibrium model of the housing market. The model is rich and incorporates many of its unique features: buyers’ and sellers’ simultaneous search behavior, heterogeneity in their motivation to trade, transaction costs, a trading mechanism with posting prices and bargaining, and the availability of an exogenous advertising technology that induces endogenous matching. Estimation uses Maximum Likelihood methods and Multiple Listing Services data. The estimated model is used to simulate housing market outcomes when (a) the amount of information displayed on housing listings increases and (b) real estate agent’s commission rates change.

Information Technology and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Ecuador

This paper studies the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the school environment on educational achievement. To quantify these effects, the impact is evaluated of a project run by the municipality of Guayaquil, Ecuador, which provides computer-aided instruction in mathematics and language to students in primary schools. Using an experimental design, it is found that the program had a positive impact on mathematics test scores (about 0. 30 of a standard deviation) and a negative but statistically insignificant effect on language test scores. The impact is heterogeneous and is much larger for those students at the top of the achievement distribution.

The Effects of Different Types of Housing Assistance on Earnings and Employment

This paper uses administrative data on non-elderly, non-disabled households that received HUD rental assistance between 1995 and 2002 combined with data from other sources to estimate the effect of low-income housing programs on their labor earnings and employment. Using longitudinal data to explain the change in these measures of market labor supply makes it possible to account for immutable, unobservable characteristics of households that are determinants of market labor supply and correlated with program participation. Employing a large random sample of households throughout the country makes it possible to produce estimates of the national average effect of each type of housing assistance. Using administrative data makes it possible to identify accurately the type of housing assistance received. The results indicate that each broad type of housing assistance has substantial negative effects on labor earnings that are somewhat smaller for tenant-based housing vouchers than for either type of project-based assistance. They also suggest that participation in the little used Family Self-Sufficiency Program, an initiative within the public housing and housing voucher programs to promote self-sufficiency, significantly increases labor earnings.

To Sell or Not to Sell: Measuring the Heat of the Housing Market

Combining list‐price, sale‐price and time‐on‐the‐market data, we estimate an index that summarizes housing market conditions and that has a direct economic interpretation. The index measures sellers bargaining power in a structural search model of home seller behavior. Structural estimation uncovers an analytical relationship between reduced form coefficients of hedonic and marketing‐time equations and structural parameters. Thus, the index can be estimated using individual‐level or aggregate data. Using housing transactions data from the Washington, D.C., area, we show that index trends coincide with the up and downturns in home appreciation rates and with popular perceptions about the “heat” of the market.

Explaining Attrition in the Housing Voucher Program

This paper uses administrative data on families that participated in HUDs Section 8 Housing Voucher Program between 1995 and 2002 combined with data from other sources to estimate the differences in attrition rates between families that differ with respect to characteristics of greatest interest for housing policy and the effects on attrition of changes in the programs main parameters. The most important results are that large decreases in the programs payment standard and increases in the tenant contribution to rent will have small effects on program attrition. These results suggest that the overwhelming majority of voucher recipients receive substantial benefits from program participation. The empirical analysis also indicates that the elderly and disabled status of the head of the family are by far the most important influences on the likelihood that the family will exit the tenant-based voucher program, with disabled families about 37 percent less likely to exit and elderly families around 23 percent less likely to exit each year than otherwise similar families. Differences in attrition rates based on other family characteristics are much smaller.

A Panel of Price Indices for Housing, Other Goods, and All Goods for All Areas in the United States 1982-2008

This paper produces a panel of price indices for housing, other produced goods, and all produced goods for each metropolitan area in the United States and the non-metropolitan part of each state from 1982 through 2008 that can be used for estimating behavioral relationships, studying the workings of markets, and assessing differences in the economic circumstances of people living in different areas. Our general approach is to first produce cross-sectional price indices for a single year 2000 and then use BLS time-series price indices to create the panel. Our geographic housing price index for 2000 is based on a large data set with detailed information about the characteristics of dwelling units and their neighborhoods throughout the United States that enables us to overcome many shortcomings of existing interarea housing price indices. For most areas, our price index for all goods other than housing is calculated from the price indices for categories of non-housing goods produced each quarter by the Council for Community and Economic Research. In order to produce a non-housing price index for areas of the United States not covered by their index, we estimate a theoretically-based regression model explaining differences in the composite price index for non-housing goods for areas where it is available and use it to predict a price of other goods for the uncovered areas. The overall consumer price index for all areas is based on the preceding estimates of the price of housing and other goods. The paper also discusses existing interarea price indices available to researchers, and it compares the new housing price index with housing price indices based on alternative methods using the same data and price indices based on alternative data sets. Electronic versions of the price indices are available online.

Sticky Floors and Glass Ceilings in Latin America

We employ unconditional quantile-decomposition methods to analyze the gender wage gap (gwg) in the urban region of twelve Latin American countries. Using data from harmonized household surveys we decompose the gwg into an explained component (differences in human capital) and an unexplained component (different rates of return to human capital). We find evidence of sticky floors (larger gwg at the tenth percentile than at the median) and glass ceilings (larger gwg at the ninetieth percentile than at the median). The former are more frequent and their magnitude is generally larger. Working women are more educated than working men all along the wage distribution, which partially hides the ‘unexplained’ pay difference. Finally, we find that poorer countries and countries with more income inequality have higher gwg at the tenth percentile of the wage distribution. Richer countries and countries with lower inequality present larger gwg at the ninetieth percent of the wage distribution.

Measuring the biases in self-reported disability status: evidence from aggregate data

Self-reported health status measures are generally used to analyse Social Security Disability Insurances (SSDI) application and award decisions as well as the relationship between its generosity and labour force participation. Due to endogeneity and measurement error, the use of self-reported health and disability indicators as explanatory variables in economic models is problematic. We employ county-level aggregate data, instrumental variables and spatial econometric techniques to analyse the determinants of variation in SSDI rates and explicitly account for the endogeneity and measurement error of the self-reported disability measure. Two surprising results are found. First, it is shown that measurement error is the dominating source of the bias and that the main source of measurement error is sampling error. Second, results suggest that there may be synergies for applying for SSDI when the disabled population is larger.

Taxes, Prisons, and CFOs: The Effects of Increased Punishment on Corporate Tax Compliance in Ecuador

This paper takes advantage of a rich firm level data set from Ecuador to analyze the effects of a reform in 2007 that introduced imprisonment for tax evasion and made a firms CFO liable for tax-crimes. Our dataset contains actual tax-return and financial-statement information for the universe of corporations in Ecuador from 2003 to 2007. We study the effects of higher punishment both at the intensive and extensive margins. We combine a difference-in-difference-in-difference approach with the DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux decomposition method. This allows us to estimate the heterogeneous effects of the reform across the distribution of firms. We find that, at the intensive margin the reform led to an average 10% increase in real corporate tax payments. However, positive effects are only found at the right tail of the tax distribution (above the 75th percentile). At the extensive margin, the probability of entry into the tax-net increased, but most of the firms that entered the tax net claimed zero taxes.

Stay Public or Go Private?: a Comparative Analysis of Water Services between Quito and Guayaquil

This paper computes several indicators of water coverage, quality, and prices in Ecuador’s two largest cities: Quito and Guayaquil—both before and after the privatization of water services in Guayaquil. The type of data sources that are used make it possible to specifically control for income and, thus, to evaluate changes in water provision, particularly among the poor. These indicators provide useful information about how certain water-related services have changed over time and facilitate evaluating the performance of each company. It should be emphasized, however, that such estimates cannot be used to identify the causal effects of the privatization of water provision. In particular, differences in a) before-concession water-coverage trends, c) rural-to-urban migration patterns, and c) other idiosyncratic institutional characteristics between these two cities, suggest that Quito may not be a suitable control group for identifying the casual effects of privatization.