Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of rising temperatures on the prevalence of informal housing in India. Previously, studies have shown that higher temperatures reduce worker productivity. Lower productivity, in turn, makes households choose informal housing. I provide reduced-form evidence that housing becomes more informal in rural areas of India experiencing temperature growth, whereas urban areas remain unaffected. The findings indicate that climate change may exacerbate rural-urban housing inequality.

Abstract: This paper examines whether land use deregulation increases housing supply in the presence of additional institutional frictions, such as ill-defined property rights. India's urban land ceiling (ULC) laws, which put ceiling limits on privately owned vacant land in the largest cities, were repealed during the 2000s. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, with a panel of over 200 cities, we find that the reform did not lead to an expected housing supply growth. This is partly because of disputes in ownership rights over vacant parcels. The disputes led to legal battles between governments and private landowners, thereby, freezing construction on vacant land. We find that, after the repeal, the number of land-related legal proceedings in ULC-enacting cities was substantially higher than in cities where ULC was never enacted. The findings underscore the role of institutional frictions in impeding or delaying the benefits of deregulation.

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of mobile phone service expansion on migration to and between cities of India during 2001-2011. We show that the number of cross-state migrants living in urban areas of India increased significantly due to telecommunications service growth. The increased migration reflects better labor and marriage market information transmission across regions as well as agglomeration benefits resulting from telecom expansion. Our findings indicate that telecommunications technologies act as forces of urban concentration, disproving the "death of distance" hypothesis. Furthermore, the findings imply that technological growth can reduce the barriers to internal migration in developing countries.

Abstract: Land use controls make housing unaffordable by impeding housing supply. As a consequence, we expect informal housing to become a more viable alternative. This paper uses a global sample of over 150 cities to investigate the impact of land use regulations on the proliferation of informal land use cover over time. Employing a spatial instrument, we show that one standard deviation higher regulatory stringency led to a doubling of informal land use cover in our sample of cities between 1990 and 2015. This estimated impact is driven primarily by highly regulated Chinese cities. Our findings indicate that land use regulations’ unintended consequences stretch beyond formal housing and labor markets.

Abstract: Accelerating climate change exposes cities to compounding socio-economic risks, yet scholarly and policy focus has narrowly examined individual disaster types, failing to address interconnected climate-disaster impacts. Based on a system-GMM approach, we develop the Integrated Climate Disaster Index (ICDI)—a multi-hazard metric capturing frequency, severity, and spatial overlap of ten disaster types—to assess the cascading impacts across 289 Chinese cities from 2010 to 2020. Results show climate disasters have immediate and persistent negative effects on urban socio-economic sides, as a one standard deviation increase in the ICDI is associated with a 0.24–0.25 standard deviation decline in housing prices. Moreover, we identify a resilience paradox where medium-risk cities suffer the steepest price reductions, reflecting a mismatch between growing disaster exposure and lagging adaptive capacity in these regions. Through three resistance pathways of resilience to unravel the mechanisms: reduced population density, erosion of human capital, and declining investor confidence, together disrupting housing stability and recovery. These findings underscore the need for locally tailored adaptation strategies, along with efforts to stabilise population flows, retain educated residents, and restore investor confidence, to enhance urban resistance and maintain housing market stability under dynamic and pluralistic climate risks.

Abstract: We study housing supply in the world's largest country. We show that droughts and highway infrastructure investments in one region of India affect housing demand in its other regions through migration. Using these migration-inducing shocks as demand-shifters, we estimate urban India's formal and informal housing (slum) supply elasticities. Our informal elasticity estimate provides empirical evidence of gentrification, that is, informal-to-formal conversions with rising rents. Our formal supply elasticity estimates indicate that Indian cities are supply inelastic.