Judge for Yourself? The Impact of Controls on the Rental Market in Interwar New York

This repository contains the complete replication materials for the paper
<b>“Judge for Yourself? The Impact of Controls on Rents in Interwar New York.” </b>The study examines how judicial discretion in the enforcement of rent control laws affected rental prices and housing market outcomes in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting variation in the partisan composition of Municipal Court Districts (MCDs), the paper estimates the impact of judge ideology on rent reductions, advertised rents, and housing supply responses. The repository includes:

<b>Processed, analysis-ready datasets</b> used directly in estimation and figure/table generation.

<b>Raw source data</b> derived from historical newspapers, census records, administrative building permits, and archival materials.

<b>Geographic crosswalk files</b> linking historical Municipal Court District boundaries to consistent modern spatial units.

<b>Fully documented replication code in R and Stata</b>, organized around master scripts that reproduce all tables and figures in the main text and appendix.

<b>LaTeX output files</b> corresponding to manuscript tables and figures.
Running the master scripts in either R or Stata reproduces all reported results. The repository is structured to allow fully automated replication.