Working Papers
Slavs Only: Open Xenophobia and Racial Disparities in Rental Housing (joint with Vladimir Avetian) under review
Abstract: Discriminatory preferences in housing markets are difficult to observe, let alone quantify. In Moscow’s rental market, however, landlords openly state racial preferences: we find that 20% of listings include explicit ethnic criteria. Using a novel high-frequency dataset, we show that listings with overtly discriminatory language (e.g., ''Slavs only'' or ''Russians only'') are 4% cheaper than comparable apartments in the same building. A correspondence experiment reveals that both overt and subtle forms of discrimination coexist and amplify each other: non-Russian-sounding applicants receive significantly fewer responses, especially when listings contain explicit bias. Even when no bias is stated, subtle discrimination persists, although it is considerably weaker. In areas with less overt discrimination, subtle bias is also less common, which suggests that when explicit prejudice declines, landlords do not compensate by discriminating more subtly. Our findings indicate that landlords are willing to bear economic costs to exclude racial minorities, directly linking prejudice to price differentials.
Public Transport: A Route to Reduce Employment Gap?
Abstract: Since commuting time is a key non-wage amenity of jobs for women (Le Barbanchon et al., 2021), public transport connectivity may be an important determinant of female employment. This paper tests this hypothesis using granular panel data on bus stop locations and census-block-level measures of gender-specific employment and transit-based job access for 46 of the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas between 2013 and 2019. The identification strategy exploits changes in the distance from each residential block to the nearest bus stop as new stops are introduced. I estimate models for female and male employment with census-block fixed effects and census-tract-by-year fixed effects, so that identification comes from within-block changes in bus-stop proximity, net of local labour-market shocks. Under the assumption that conditional changes in distance to the nearest bus stop are orthogonal to unobserved determinants of employment, I find that improved access to bus stops significantly increases female employment, while male employment is unaffected. New bus stops reduce the employment gender gap. The effect is robust to alternative distance thresholds, functional forms, and sample restrictions. Consistent with a commuting-time mechanism, I further show that improved bus-stop proximity increases public-transport commuting, particularly among women.
Publications in Russian
Estimation of Electronic Procedures Effects in Public Procurement Under Favoritism (joint with Sergei Belev and Evgenii Matveev)
Voprosy Ekonomiki. 2023 (In Russian)
Priority Development Areas and Productivity Growth in Russian Cities (joint with Sergei Belev and Olga Suchkova)
HSE Economic Journal. 2021 (In Russian)