We study how the design of rental subsidies shapes landlord behavior in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, the largest rental assistance program in the United States. We focus on how the program's rent ceiling, known as the payment standard, shapes landlords' price-setting and tenant selection decisions, which in turn affect the neighborhood outcomes of voucher holders and the program's overall cost. Combining administrative data on all voucher holders with nationwide rental listings, we document bunching patterns in both contract and listed rents at payment standards. We then apply bunching estimators to disentangle the motivations behind landlord pricing behavior. Additionally, we examine potential "overcharging", in which landlords raise rents to the payment standard or above listed prices to capture additional subsidy. Finally, we assess how these behaviors vary across neighborhood contexts. Our findings underscore the importance of subsidy design in shaping landlord participation, price-setting practices, and the overall effectiveness of the HCV program.

Racial residential segregation in U.S. cities rose sharply during the first half of the twentieth century. We study whether early federal public housing contributed to this rise by examining the first projects built by the Public Works Administration in the mid-1930s, most of which were racially designated. Using newly assembled data on project locations linked to full-count Census records from 1910 to 1950 and comparing built to planned-but-not-built projects, we find that public housing reinforced the racial composition of project sites but had little effect on surrounding neighborhoods. The results suggest that early public housing played a limited role in shaping neighborhood-level segregation.

Over the past half-century, housing assistance in the U.S. has shifted from direct public provision toward provision through private markets, culminating in the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, which has converted over 200,000 public housing units to project-based Section 8 private subsidies since 2014. We examine whether this shift toward private provision changes program targeting, as measured by tenant composition. Using nationwide administrative data from HUD and a difference-in-differences design that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of RAD conversions, we find that RAD leads to lower-income households living in converted developments over time. We decompose this effect into three mechanisms: lower income eligibility thresholds under Section 8, manager-driven responses, and tenant self-targeting. While eligibility changes contribute to the main result, focusing on incumbent households--who are unaffected by eligibility rule changes--reveals that the remaining two channels also contribute to the result: higher-income incumbents are more likely to exit converted developments over time. We provide suggestive evidence that non-profit managers serve lower-income households than their for-profit counterparts, and that higher-income incumbents are more likely to take up the tenant-based voucher option offered by RAD and use it to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods.

The Housing Choice Voucher program provides substantial rental subsidies to low-income households, yet many recipients struggle to secure housing with their vouchers, particularly in low-poverty areas. This paper examines a key bottleneck in the program: landlord discrimination against voucher holders. Using a nationwide dataset from a major online rental platform, we identify listings that explicitly seek or reject voucher holders. We find significant variation across metropolitan areas, with voucher-seeking listings ranging from nearly zero to 18 percent and voucher-rejecting listings ranging from nearly zero to 28 percent. Within metros, landlords in high-poverty neighborhoods with larger Black and voucher populations are more likely to seek voucher holders, while rejection of voucher holders is relatively more common in low-poverty neighborhoods. Using a difference-in-differences design, we provide causal evidence that statewide prohibitions on source-of-income discrimination significantly reduce voucher-rejecting listings, especially in low-poverty neighborhoods, effectively eliminating cross-neighborhood differences in discriminatory behavior.