Arpit Gupta Profile picture
Associate Professor of Finance, @NYUStern. Finance/Real Estate/Urban newsletter: https://t.co/lWVJvq6vKg.
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Sep 16 8 tweets 5 min read
🚨 New publicly available dataset on housing regulations across US municipalities

With @AlexBartik and @DMilo75, we highlight a novel AI-based method for accurate categorization of regulations in unstructured text, which we use to establish 5 facts about housing regulation: Image 1⃣ US housing production disproportionately happens in unincorporated areas

Bulk of US housing production, including a majority in the South, happens in these mostly greenfield, exurban developments outside cities that are far from jobs and amenities, but allow more housing.

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Aug 7, 2023 15 tweets 8 min read
🚨New paper on office-> residential conversions!🚨

Remote work has crushed office markets, but what are we supposed to do about it?

With @SVNieuwerburgh and Candy Martinez, we explore the viability of converting brown offices into green apartments. A 🧵: Image Link:

Office demand has cratered, while apartment rents remain stubbornly high

At the same time, old office buildings still produce a lot of greenhouse gases (subject to increasing carbon taxes in NYC)

But how feasible is it to convert dirty offices?nber.org/papers/w31530
Mar 13, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
Lots of great commentary on SVB, but I think a few points that get missed:

1. You can't just mark to market the assets down with higher interest rates. You also need to account for the fact that higher interest rates *raise* bank franchise value
pages.stern.nyu.edu/~asavov/alexis… At least as long as deposit betas are low, ie insured depositors are sleepy and don't run.

Why? Higher interest rates -> lower asset values, but also raise deposit spreads, so banks NIM remains ~same.

This is how banks do maturity transformation without taking int rate risk
Mar 11, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
Paul Romer at the NYU New Cities Conference:

The spread of the Westphalian nation state idea partitioned the world’s population into distinct migration networks and law codes shutting people out of prosperity

In particular shut down trade in gov services and rule of law Image Urban trilemma, pick 2:

• Large scale immigration
• Equal treatment under the law
• local democratic accountability

- Most democratic countries violate immigration
- Middle East takes away equal treatment (Glen Weyl advocates for this)
- Hong Kong gave up on democracy
Oct 24, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
A basic intuition I have about the nomadic lifestyles of the very wealthy

People associate with others at similar income level as them. But, at the highest income scale, there are few comparables — and they are geographically spread out. So you travel a lot to meet them. Something similar happens with academic faculty — people are traveling all the time to go to conferences and seminars in order to interact with people who give highest match quality — people working in your very narrow niche, who are unlikely to be geographically proximate.
Oct 21, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
LA doesn’t build as much as it used to, and rents have gone up.

Phoenix did permit as many homes last year as in 2005, so unclear if supply will reverse some covid price spikes of if housing supply elasticites have just worsened everywhere ImageImage We’ve zoned out opportunity: areas with high mobility restrict housing construction Image
Oct 8, 2022 13 tweets 5 min read
Here’s what happened in India this week. We're focusing on manufacturing incentives and growth.

A 🧵1/13: A big discussion going on is the expanding Production Linked Incentive (PLI) program—industrial policy intended to boost productivity

@somnath1978 describes this as a form of “direct cash grants” for firms, a way for India to grow manufacturing skills
Sep 24, 2022 4 tweets 4 min read
Robert Caro at work: planner with daily word count goal (aiming for 1,000 words/day).

He doesn’t work on Sundays, but other days he doesn’t write he enters in “0 (lazy)” for the day’s word count. He writes these helpful notes to himself like “Don’t ruin it” and “Don’t rush”
Sep 24, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
.@TrungTPhan on the Adani Empire, world’s second richest business group at $140b. The🔑s to success:

- Scaling up infra aligned with gov priorities like ports
- large energy investments, and huge multiples attached to green
- lots of leverage

trungphan.substack.com/p/gautam-adani… The Economist and the FT discuss Adani and Ambani here. Reasonable concerns about concentration of wealth.

But one concern I don’t agree with — that the return on invested capital (10% ish and high leverage are bad).

economist.com/business/2022/…

ft.com/content/474706…
Sep 16, 2022 14 tweets 6 min read
Here's happened in India this week, Sep 12.

We're talking about India's mega-firm driven economic growth, and industrial policy. 1/14 🧵 India has gone past the UK now to become the world's fifth largest economy
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Aug 27, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read
All this happen in Pakistan this week. A thread. 1/14 🧵 Shifting focus from India to Pakistan this week with interesting news there.

This started with Imran Khan sweeping Karachi's by-elections — surprising since he's been more a Punjab dominated party — and following Punjab by-election wins

dtnext.in/world/2022/08/…
Aug 25, 2022 17 tweets 8 min read
Okay now we have — publicly available — an explosive trio of papers in Science from Lazaridis, Reich, and Team on the genetics of the "Southern Arc", a short thread digging in 🧵

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… ImageImageImage The first paper presents the idea that Neolithic Anatolians are a composite population between local Anatolian hunter gatherers, and a cline between:
• Levantine (Natufian?) Neolithic
• Zagros-Caucasus inland goat herder types ImageImageImageImage
Aug 25, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Latest Reich lab evidence seems to supports the Indo-Hittite/Anatolian hypothesis—languages like Hittite split off from an already Indo-European speaking population in the eastern Caucasus, which then spread elsewhere through steppe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Hitt…
iias.huji.ac.il/event/david-re… ImageImage Lack of a steppe cline in elite Mycenaen Greek burials also interesting. Suggestive maybe that societies that have more of a cline had pre-existing hierarchy that IEs came into
Aug 19, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read
What happened in India the week of August 15

Looking back at 75 years of Indian independence 🧵 Good thread here on the history of Indian partition which led to the creation of separate countries
Aug 12, 2022 17 tweets 9 min read
Threat on what happened in India this week, Aug 8

We're going to revisit a classic question — what is India's scope for rapid industrialization? Is there a growing opportunity now? 🧵 First — *should* India get into more manufacturing? Raghuram Rajan has been skeptical — points out there has been backlash against manufacturing in China, and suggests services should do more of the job.
economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/p…
Aug 5, 2022 19 tweets 6 min read
Thread on what happened in India.

This week, Aug 1, we're talking about demand and supply constraints 🧵 Developed countries right now are dealing with a lot of inflation, of course, and there is a widespread sense that fiscal stimulus and the demand side has something to do with this, along with covid-related supply disruptions
Aug 3, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Hadn't seen that the cheetah reintroduction to India is happening — seems great!

These are African cheetahs, which diverged from Asian cheetahs (only found in the wild in Iran) ~72 kya. But that's close enough it seems they should do okay.
nature.com/articles/s4159… It's not clear how many cheetahs there ever were in India. They seem to have been rare already by British times.

Also unclear how many lions India ever had also — a suggestion they actually arrived fairly recently (within last ~10k years)
Jul 22, 2022 16 tweets 7 min read
Thread on what happened in India the week of July 18 🧵 Sri Lanka’s collapse has triggered interest in economic fragility in the neighborhood. Michael Rubin argues we should worry about a coming collapse in Pakistan:
nationalinterest.org/feature/pakist…
Jun 11, 2022 13 tweets 6 min read
A thread on the historical links between Greece and Italy:🧵 Around ~6000BC, you have the Cardial Ware Culture — the early European farmers, who came from Anatolia. One branch went up the Danube, another took the maritime route to Italy.

Sardinia continues to have the largest ancestral share from this population.
Jun 9, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
From Moretti and Diamond: the most and least expensive cities across different income groups. Most expensive:
• San Jose
• San Francisco
• San Diego Image Consumption of high income groups is a bit more sensitive, more elastic to local prices than consumption of low income consumers Image
Nov 5, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read
Okay let’s figure out why Zillow Offers failed.

Buchak Matvos Piskorski Seru quantify the frictions (especially adverse selection) that limit dealer intermediation in real estate, Ie iBuyers.

conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f1… iBuyers buy quickly; the pay less (a 3.6% discount); and are active in liquid markets and easy to value homes.