Colin Williams

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in economics at the University of Virginia. My research interests include urban and public economics. You can find my CV here, or you can read about my current projects below.

Working Papers and Work in Progress

State Law, Local Finances, and Housing Affordability: The Uneven Effects of Flat Fees

Manufactured housing placements have declined dramatically relative to site-built housing since the 1980s, representing a missed opportunity for affordable homeownership. This paper proposes and tests a novel explanation for this transformation: the development impact fees adopted by local governments. Many jurisdictions implemented flat, per-unit permitting fees that disproportionately increased the cost of manufactured housing relative to site-built alternatives. Leveraging the staggered rollout of state enabling acts from 1987-2006, I estimate that such legislation reduced manufactured housing as a share of all new housing units by four percentage points from a pre-treatment average of 11\%. My results demonstrate how per-unit fees can have uneven distributional consequences and highlight how state policy frameworks shape local fiscal decisions and housing affordability.

Retailer Congestion and The Timing of Transfer Payments (with Yooseon Hwang)

This paper documents the significance and incidence of congestion in retail settings. Using granular geolocation data, we show a robust empirical relationship between shopping speeds and visitor counts using both descriptive and quasi-experimental methods. We leverage variation in foot traffic caused by the timing of welfare payments, such as SNAP, that generate large increases in foot traffic at specific retailers during disbursement weeks. We find that congestion costs appear only when retailers experience above-average traffic. Our results imply that policymakers can generate substantial welfare gains at little cost by smoothing the disbursement of welfare benefits over time.