Sam Wylde
Ph.D Candidate
Job Market Candidate, 2025-2026
Economics
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Fields: Urban Economics, Public Economics, Applied Microeconomics
References: Marcus Casey, Ben Feigenberg, Dan Hartley
Job Market Paper: Investors and Racial Disparities in the Return to Housing
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of investors in explaining racial disparities in the return to housing. Using New York City real estate transactions in a within-property design, I quantify the Black White gap in realized returns to housing among homeowners who sell to investors. Black homeowners accept a 12.9% discount from investor purchasers relative to White homeowners who also sell to investors. Consequently, Black homeowners who sell to investors realize annualized returns 2.4 percentage points lower than White homeowners who do the same. I present evidence that these investor discounts function as risk premia that Black homeowners "pay" in exchange for insulation from uncertainty associated with mortgage-financed purchases and price volatility, to which they are uniquely exposed. Consistent with this mechanism, Black homeowners accept larger discounts for all-cash purchases, which investors frequently make, and allow steeper concessions to investors when price volatility is elevated. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation in investor purchases from neighborhood rezonings yields results that align with those from my within-property design. Rezonings raise price volatility and increase investor purchase activity from Black homeowners, whose gains from the reforms are relatively less than those of White homeowners.