Downgrading housing's innovation dividend

Back in 2023, we asked Michael Wiebe to take a look at a 2021 article by Enrico Moretti titled “The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors.” We were interested because one of the inputs to our grantmaking decisions is a quantitative estimate of the social impact of a grant, and this paper was important for our estimate of how housing affects innovation. Unfortunately Wiebe found a lot of problems with the paper, prompting us to substantially downgrade the weight we put on the innovation effects of new housing. Other (non-innovation) benefits of housing now form a much larger part our estimate of its impact (though we’ll revise estimates again as new evidence emerges). Wiebe has now written up his conclusions on his substack, and a comment on the paper will appear in the journal in which it was originally published.