Abstract: As housing unaffordability intensifies in the United States, rent regulation has reemerged as a contentious policy response. A large empirical literature documents its effects on housing supply and efficiency, yet we know remarkably little about its long-term consequences for the families and children it is intended to protect. This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood exposure to World War II-era federal rent control, one of the largest rental market interventions in U.S. history. I introduce a newly digitized dataset of Federal Register records measuring the introduction and withdrawal of rent controls across municipalities, which I link to restricted-use IRS tax records from 1969 to 1994 and the 1940 and 2000 Decennial Censuses. Using a cohort-based difference-in-differences design exploiting geographic and cross-cohort variation in policy timing and duration, I find that each additional year of childhood exposure increased average annual adult household income by approximately $1,200, raised college completion, and increased long-term residential mobility. These gains, however, were distributed unequally: white children benefited roughly four times as much as Black children. The findings demonstrate that state institutions governing access to essential goods can have lasting consequences for children's life chances, while also reproducing inequalities embedded in the markets they regulate.
Bio: Max Fineman is a sociologist whose research examines how housing markets shape wealth inequality and intergenerational mobility. Their research combines population-scale linked Census and IRS administrative data, national property records, and newly digitized historical archives with quantitative and causal inference methods. Drawing on economic sociology, political economy, and social stratification, their work investigates how the dramatic rise in asset prices over the past four decades has redistributed economic advantage across households, and how state institutions and policies have shaped both the accumulation of wealth and the distributional conflict it produces.
Max received their PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.