Kristen Tauber

I am a doctoral candidate at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a doctoral fellow at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. I will be on the job market in fall 2026. 

My research interests include urban economics, public economics, and housing policy, with particular attention to how government regulation and landlord management practices affect the housing stability of low-income renters.

My dissertation work utilizes novel administrative rent transactions data from a large landlord operating across multiple states, policy environments, and housing markets to examine tenant payment patterns.  These data allow for a broad and robust research agenda examining the impact of understudied landlord management practices such as late fees and security deposits on landlord-tenant relationships and tenant payment behavior, with the goal of generating timely and actionable findings for policymakers.

Prior to my PhD, I was a research analyst at the Cleveland Fed. 

For more information, please find my full CV here. 

Research

Job Market Paper

Prompt or Penalty? The Impact of Late Fees on Rent Payment in Subsidized Housing

Abstract: Late and nonpayment of rent can be conceptualized as landlords extending households a line of credit. As in other credit markets, landlords use late fees to incentivize timely payment; however, late payment may reflect moral hazard or financial distress. Where households can pay but choose not to, or forget, late fees may prompt timely payment. For households facing an unexpected income shock, a late fee may simply add to their debt. Whether late fees encourage payment, and for whom, is an open empirical question. In federally subsidized housing, this question is particularly relevant as these programs aim to reduce rent burden, and late fees add to housing costs. This paper presents the first causal analysis of late fees and payment behavior. Using transaction-level rent data, I leverage variation in when subsidized properties re-adopted late fees after the COVID-19 pandemic. After reintroduction, on-time rent payment rises, driven primarily by households with strong prior payment histories. Households with recent, persistent default histories are no more likely to pay on time but are more likely to exit the property, and to exit with more debt. This suggests that late fees may discourage strategic nonpayment while making it harder for struggling households to recover.

Please reach out with any inquiries or for a copy of the latest draft.

Journal Publications

"Slipping Into and Out of Arrears: The Dynamics of Arrears Spells in Subsidized Housing" with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan. Housing Policy Debate, Conditionally Accepted.

"Childhood Exposure to Violence and Nurturing Relationships: The Long-Run Effects on Black Men" with Dionissi Aliprantis. Journal of Applied Econometrics, Forthcoming. [Link]

"Whom Do We Serve? Refining Public Housing Agency Service Areas" with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan. Cityscape, 2024. [Link]

"What Determines the Success of Housing Mobility Programs?" with Dionissi Aliprantis and Hal Martin. Journal of Housing Economics, 2024. [Link]

Working Papers

Prompt or Penalty? The Impact of Late Fees on Rent Payment in Subsidized Housing. (Job Market Paper)

The Role of Security Deposits in Project-Based Section 8 Housing. with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan.

Other Publications