This is a working paper on the housing supply effects of environmental permitting regulations.

Environmental permitting laws have broad applications across nearly all economic activities in the United States, with potentially large costs as well as large benefits. These laws require projects or activities that might have an impact on the environment to undergo a review and approval process before they can proceed. They required the New York state government, for example, to produce a 4,000-page report over 4 years on the potential environmental impacts of their congestion pricing plan.

Despite this importance, environmental permitting laws are difficult to study because these laws were passed nationally and unilaterally, leaving no comparison or control group with which to measure their effects. My project takes advantage of a particular environmental permitting law, the Endangered Species Act, which, although it is a national law, is only enforced near the habitats of endangered species. The list of species and their habitat range has changed significantly over time, creating many natural experiments that I can use to precisely quantify the effect of environmental permitting laws.