Rebecca DiamondAndersen Institute Advisor
Rebecca Diamond is the Class of 1988 Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Diamond received her PhD in Economics from Harvard in 2013 and spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research before joining the Stanford GSB faculty. She has served as a coeditor of the Journal of Public Economics and an associate editor at AEJ: Applied and Econometrica.
Her most important impact to date comes from her work on the economic implications of divergent location choices by workers of different skill levels. In “The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers’ Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000” (AER, 2016, lead article), she observes that the rise in the U.S. college wage premium coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. Using a structural spatial equilibrium model combined with credible quasi-experimental variation, she finds that geographic sorting led to welfare changes that were substantially greater than what is implied by the growth in the college wage premium alone.
Rebecca has also made important contributions to housing policy and urban economics. In “The Effects of Rent Control Expansions on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco” (AER 2019, with Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian), she studies the impact of rent control using a careful quasi-experimental design and finds that it leads to reductions in housing supply through sale and redevelopment, which in turn increases gentrification, drives up rents, and makes housing less affordable. In a complementary paper (JPE 2019, with Tim McQuade) she finds that Low-Income Housing Tax Credits have positive spillover effects on nearby properties, increasing housing prices, lowering crime and increasing racial diversity. She has also shown that housing supply inelasticity increases a local governments’ ability to extract rents, a clever test of the “Leviathan” hypothesis (AEJ: Policy, 2017).
Rebecca has also written important papers on other topics, such as high-skilled immigration, gender wage gaps, and nutritional inequality.
Her most important impact to date comes from her work on the economic implications of divergent location choices by workers of different skill levels. In “The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers’ Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000” (AER, 2016, lead article), she observes that the rise in the U.S. college wage premium coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. Using a structural spatial equilibrium model combined with credible quasi-experimental variation, she finds that geographic sorting led to welfare changes that were substantially greater than what is implied by the growth in the college wage premium alone.
Rebecca has also made important contributions to housing policy and urban economics. In “The Effects of Rent Control Expansions on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco” (AER 2019, with Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian), she studies the impact of rent control using a careful quasi-experimental design and finds that it leads to reductions in housing supply through sale and redevelopment, which in turn increases gentrification, drives up rents, and makes housing less affordable. In a complementary paper (JPE 2019, with Tim McQuade) she finds that Low-Income Housing Tax Credits have positive spillover effects on nearby properties, increasing housing prices, lowering crime and increasing racial diversity. She has also shown that housing supply inelasticity increases a local governments’ ability to extract rents, a clever test of the “Leviathan” hypothesis (AEJ: Policy, 2017).
Rebecca has also written important papers on other topics, such as high-skilled immigration, gender wage gaps, and nutritional inequality.
Education
- PhD in Economics, Harvard University, 2013
- MA in Economics, Harvard University, 2011
- BS in Physics, 2nd major in Economics & Mathematics, Yale, 2007