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Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation: Comment

Brian Greaney

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics2026https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20230141article
AJG 4ABDC A*
Weight
0.50

Abstract

Hsieh and Moretti (2019) find that relaxing land use regulations in three productive US cities would increase GDP by 3.7 percent. In this comment, I revisit their findings. I first attempt to replicate their result and find that their counterfactual would lower output. I document errors in their code that explain this discrepancy. I next show that the results of their model depend on the arbitrary choice of population unit. I propose a modification to their model that eliminates unit dependence. Their experiment raises output in the modified model, but the effect is two orders of magnitude smaller than what they report. (JEL E23, J24, J31, R23, R31)

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20230141

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@article{brian2026,
  title        = {{Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation: Comment}},
  author       = {Brian Greaney},
  journal      = {American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20230141},
}

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Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation: Comment

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.