COVID-19 and housing prices: evidence from U.S. county-level data.

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on housing prices at the U.S. county level. The effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices are formally investigated by using a two-way fixed effects panel regression, where county-specific factors, time-specific factors, and mobility measures of individuals are controlled for. The benchmark results show evidence for negative and significant effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices, robust to the consideration of several permutation tests, where the negative effects are more evident in counties with higher poverty rates. Exclusion tests further suggest that U.S. counties in the state of California or the month of May 2020 are more responsible for the empirical results, although the results based on other counties and months are still in line with the benchmark results.