Location, Location, Location: Manufacturing and House Price Growth

Abstract

Exploiting data on tens of millions of housing transactions, we show that (1) house prices grew by less in manufacturing-heavy US regions, (2) that this pattern is especially present for the lowest-value homes, and (3) that price declines coincided with worse labor market outcomes, consistent with an income channel. Counterfactual accounting exercises reveal that regional differences in the growth of these lowest-value homes are an important driver of the changes in overall house price inequality. Hence, the economic decline in manufacturing-heavy areas extends far beyond income and employment flows to house prices.