Papers by Anthony Orlando
Cambridge Journal of Economics, Oct 31, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
Social Science Research Network, 2022
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 4, 2017
The housing crisis of the 2000s exposed fissures in the U.S. financial system. These shortcomings... more The housing crisis of the 2000s exposed fissures in the U.S. financial system. These shortcomings allowed the system to become encumbered with excessive risk and ultimately triggered the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In the wake of the deep recession, many academics and researchers wrote post-mortems identifying key causes of the crisis. In 2010, Congress passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also known as Dodd-Frank, and President Obama signed it into law. It sought to address many of the identified problems by reforming regulations pertaining to mortgage lending, securities trading, banking, insurance, consumer protection, and corporate governance. This chapter explores three causes of the crisis that the regulatory reforms have yet to fully address. First, we highlight challenges that prevented credit rating agencies from being a useful source of information for mortgage-backed securities investors to impose effective market discipline on issuers. Second, we show the failure of several institutional arrangements designed to prevent firm owners and managers from looting the institutions over the short run at the expense of shareholders, who are expecting a maximization of profits over the longer term. Finally, we consider markets from the consumer perspective. We note the tension between overcoming market tendencies to ration credit and exposing households with limited resources to risks associated with products that can broaden access to credit by easing borrowing constraints. In each case, we offer possible strategies for more effectively tackling these problems. Regarding ratings agencies, we propose a new structure where agencyinvestor conflicts of interest are removed and agencies only assess "ratings eligible" products. Reforms in executive compensation, covenant banking for investment banks, and increased penalties for looting that make criminal liability a real deterrent for firm owners and managers are possible avenues to reduce the likelihood of looting by insiders. Third, we argue that significant investments should be made in financial education to make consumers an additional bulwark-to go with laws and regulations-against abuses and bad outcomes. To begin, we tell the story of Black Friday, a deep financial crisis that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. We take this historical approach because Black Friday
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
In Keeping Races in Their Places, Anthony Orlando shows himself to be the rarest of writers-both ... more In Keeping Races in Their Places, Anthony Orlando shows himself to be the rarest of writers-both a scholar of a high caliber and a storyteller of singular ability. Here, he uses those talents to offer an economic history that illustrates in gripping fashion how American policies have, from generation to generation, squeezed ordinary Black families and resulted in ongoing disparities of wealth, opportunity and dignity. In this way, he helps us to understand where our systems have failed and how we can and must collectively reinvent them."-Rob Asghar, Author, Leadership Is Hell and Blogging Contributor, Forbes "Anthony Orlando tells the story of redlining-how it was created, how it enforced segregation for more than two generations, and how the impacts have impoverished Black Americans to this day. Decades after redlining was eliminated, the system persists; Black Americans die sooner and accrue less wealth than Whites. The reason is rooted in our nation's deep history of residential segregation which was designed by the federal government at the height of the 1930s New Deal. Orlando summarizes the best academic research on the topic. Yet he does that with a writing style that has the flair of a mystery novel. You want to turn the page to learn what happens next and to follow the human stories that center the book. While making the story interesting and accessible, Orlando never sacrifices scholarly rigor. What we take for granted in the USneighborhoods divided by income, race, class, and opportunity-was engineered and enforced by the federal government, and the effects are now self-perpetuating long after residential segregation was outlawed. Anyone interested in putting together a divided country should start by reading this account of how that divide was created, and how it will sustain itself unless we build policies that work to reverse the legacy of a century of housing segregation."-Marlon G. Boarnet, Chair, Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis Department, University of Southern California "The work of Orlando in Keeping Races in Their Places lays bare the naked truth that the United States government, state governments, and the mortgage and banking industry have continuously stacked the deck against Black and Brown Americans. By the use of 21st century advanced digital technology, Orlando clearly reveals permanent redlined ghettos Keeping Races in Their Places Spanning the era from the Great Migration to the Great Recession, Keeping Races in Their Places uses the latest economic insights to uncover the roots of the Black-White wealth gap, the subprime lending crisis, and today's lack of affordable housing in maps created by banks nearly a century ago. Most of all, it offers hope that with the latest scholarly tools we can pinpoint how things went wrong-and what we must do to make them right.
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
Social Science Research Network, 2020
We use engineering data on building assemblies to estimate the average and marginal costs of deve... more We use engineering data on building assemblies to estimate the average and marginal costs of developing multistory apartment buildings in the 50 largest cities in the United States. The majority of housing in the least affordable cities is in multistory buildings, but most of our knowledge of how housing is produced is limited to single-family homes. By focusing on the vertical margin, we discover non-linearities in the cost curve and directly estimate the returns to scale, which allow us to measure the impact of height regulations on break-even rents of new supply. We find that height regulation has large, negative effects on affordability, with increasing magnitudes for more expensive land markets.
2019 APPAM Fall Research Conference, Nov 8, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
Social Science Research Network, 2020
Social Science Research Network, 2022
Social Science Research Network, 2023
25th Annual European Real Estate Society Conference, 2018
This paper tests the extent to which credit market shocks affect different quantiles in the housi... more This paper tests the extent to which credit market shocks affect different quantiles in the housing price distribution. We use the new "recentered influence function" methodology to recover the unconditional distribution of housing prices in response to (1) unexpected monetary policy decisions and (2) changes in credit supply. We find that tight monetary policy leads to an increase in housing prices across most of the distribution, with larger increases for higher-priced homes, resulting in an increase in price dispersion. In contrast, increases in loan volume lead to higher home prices across the entire distribution, with the largest increases for the midpriced homes. Importantly, we show that the credit supply effect changes during the 2000-2006 "bubble" period, leading to higher prices at the bottom of the distribution. These price effects are large and significant-and can explain much of the change in wealth inequality over time. More generally, they challenge the common assumptions that policies can be properly evaluated by average effects and that housing affordability can be sufficiently summarized by median statistics.
Social Science Research Network, 2021
This report uses estimates from the Congressional Budget Office to project an unemployment scenar... more This report uses estimates from the Congressional Budget Office to project an unemployment scenario for the Pandemic Recession. We go on to use detailed unemployment and homeless data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between unemployment and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States. Then we assess the condition of the housing market and identify steps for preventing evictions and increasing the housing supply. We examine characteristics of workers who are most likely to fall through the cracks of the economy and identify the risk factors that make them vulnerable. Then we describe how employment programs can use their skills to meet public needs.
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2021
2016 Fall Conference: The Role of Research in Making Government More Effective, Nov 3, 2016
2016 Fall Conference: The Role of Research in Making Government More Effective, Nov 5, 2016
We all know that housing prices have followed a boom-and-bust trajectory over the past fifteen ye... more We all know that housing prices have followed a boom-and-bust trajectory over the past fifteen years, but which segments of the population experienced the sharpest rise and fall-and in which parts of the country? Using transaction-level data from multiple large urban counties, I analyze the entire distribution, breaking down the change in housing prices into quantiles. I measure the change in the distribution in house prices in each city, determine how much of the change can be explained by quality variables, and investigate what differences between the cities might be causing the variation in their housing price distributions-especially during the housing bubble, which some cities experienced more acutely than others. This analysis allows me to identify which segments of the population were most sensitive to the boom-andbust-and in which cities-with policy implications for the role of the housing market in social equity and financial stability going forward.
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Papers by Anthony Orlando