Osman Keshawarz

Curriculum Vitae

November, 2023

Placement Director: Robert Pollin, Ph.D.

(413) 577-0126          pollin@econs.umass.edu

Dissertation Summary

Three Essays on Urban Economics

My dissertation is an exploration of the social, spatial, and economic relation of rent, and in particular, residential ground rents. While much has been written in the political economy literature regarding agrarian rents, comparatively little has been written on ground rents in urban capitalist economies. This dissertation synthesizes the work of classical political economy and the critical geography, focusing on growth and distribution in an urban context, with applications to housing policy. The first essay develops a theoretical framework based on classical political economy theories of ground rent, with particular focus on Karl Marx and Henry George. The second essay uses this framework to develop a theory of urban growth and distribution grounded in a tripartite class division between landlords, capitalists, and labor. The final essay is an empirical examination of rent control in the state of New Jersey.

Towards a Theory of Ground Rent

This essay develops a framework for understanding the role of landed property and ground rents in the operation of developed capitalist economies. This essay argues that, rather than being either simply subsumed under industrial or financial capital, landlords function as a distinct third class within capitalism—a view that had been common to the theories of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, George, and to some extent Keynes, but had largely been abandoned after John Bates Clark. I focus particularly on the work Marx and George, while borrowing heavily from radical geography and urban sociology (in particular, the idea of the socio-spatial dialectic) to develop a spatial theory of ground rent. In this framework, capitalists, landlords, and workers engage in conflict over the production and distribution of surplus value, where the crucial determinants of the landlord’s share are the spatial structure of capitalist production and private property rights over land. I address differences in dynamics between primary (i.e., space used in direct production as in commercial real estate) and secondary (i.e., space indirectly used in production, as in residential real estate), with a main focus on the latter.

What do Landlords Do? Residential Rents and Landed Property

My second essay uses the Marxist-Georgist framework developed in the first essay to develop a theoretical account of urban growth and distribution in an advanced capitalist economy. In particular, I address the following questions: How are the distribution of gains to urban economic growth affected by the distribution of and control over rights to land and housing? In order to answer this question, I develop a model of growth and distribution under the three-class framework, where the total surplus produced in an urban economy is divided into wages, profits, and rents, based on Sheppard and Barnes’ Sraffian model in The Capitalist Space Economy (1990). The major focus of this essay is to examine the role that landed property plays in determining the ultimate distribution of gains from growth and the structure of the built environment in cities.

The Effects and Effectiveness of Rent Control: Evidence from New Jersey

The final essay is an intervention into the debate over rent control in the United States. Despite being widely panned by mainstream economists, calls for the implementation of rent regulations in the face of rising urban rents and stagnating wages. Opposition to rent control has been primarily on theoretical grounds on the basis of neoclassical assumptions regarding the effects of price controls, though the results of the few extant empirical studies have been decidedly mixed. In this essay, I construct a dataset of 112 rent controlled towns in New Jersey. I combine this with data on rents and households from the American Community Survey to create a 2-period panel data set. With this data, I use a firstdifference estimation strategy to examine the impacts of rent control on median gross rents, the rental housing stock, and the total housing stock. To isolate cases where rent controls are binding, I use a geographic matching algorithm to identify rent controlled towns bordering top-quartile and top-half rent growth towns and examine the differential growth in rents and the stock of rental housing.