Journal of Housing Economics最新文献

We decompose the break-even rents of new multifamily housing into three cost components — land prices, construction costs, and financial capital — for 50 of the largest cities in the United States from 2012 to 2020. This is accomplished by combining existing data on land prices and income capitalization rates with a new data series on local historical pricing of required construction components of complete buildings called “assemblies”. For both 3-story, wood-framed buildings and 12-story, steel-framed buildings, we find that construction costs contribute significantly to the growth of break-even rents, and the relative contribution of construction costs exceeds that of land values for the taller buildings. Meanwhile, cap rates have declined, mediating the effect of development costs on the rents borne by tenants. Overall, there is significant variation in rent growth across cities that can be explained by these three cost factors.

Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) support residential mobility to reduce economic segregation. One design feature of HMPs requires identifying areas to which moving will most improve outcomes. We show that ranking neighborhoods’ effects using current residents’ outcomes has strengths over using previous residents’ outcomes due to statistical uncertainty, bias from sorting over time, and lack of support. We simulate how the choice of neighborhood ranking and others affect an originally-intended outcome of HMPs: reducing racial segregation. HMP success on this dimension depends on the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and the range of neighborhoods targeted.

This paper shows that skills acquired by early adulthood affect homeownership levels achieved later in life in important ways. The paper examines three sets of skills—cognitive skills, as measured by the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score; non-cognitive skills (specifically, the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives), measured by the Rotter score; and social skills, using a Social score based on Deming (2017). Mediation analysis is used to identify both the direct and indirect effects of these skills, as captured by the three different types of scores, on homeownership. We show that the AFQT score measuring cognitive skills not only captures direct effects on the homeownership rate, but even larger indirect effects through the mediator variables—education and income. AFQT scores in early adulthood are shown to be highly predictive of homeownership outcomes, explaining roughly one-quarter to one-third of the disparate outcomes between White, Black, and Hispanic households. We also examine the degree to which the AFQT, Rotter, and Social scores explain variation in homeownership rates over an individual's life cycle. The findings suggest that reducing disparities in educational outcomes would meaningfully contribute to reducing minority homeownership gaps.

This paper examines the effect of restricting opioid prescription on homelessness. We assess this relationship by exploiting plausible exogenous variation in prescribed opioid supply derived from an opioid restriction policy: the hydrocodone (i.e., Vicodin, not oxycodone products like Oxycontin) rescheduling. We identified the causal effect of this decrease in the supply of hydrocodone, the most prescribed opioid in the U.S. and comprising 55% of overall use opioid prescription dispensing, by comparing the number of homeless individuals in geographies with higher exposure to Hydrocodone against those in areas with lower exposure, before and after the enactment of the policy. We find that in the quarter following hydrocodone upscheduling, the rate of people experiencing homelessness decreased by almost 56 per 100,000 inhabitants (a 25.4% reduction relative to the pre-policy mean). In addition, results show that hydrocodone prescriptions, drug related deaths, unemployment, and divorce rates decrease following the upscheduling. Taken together, our results suggest that during our study period (2007–2017) the hydrocodone rescheduling reduced homelessness by preventing some household crises.

Echoing recent policies implemented in Seattle and Portland, we examine perceptions of the fairness of the first-come, first-served (FCFS) rule in the context of discrimination in the rental housing market. To do so, we use an original hypothetical survey experiment in which a rental agent is confronted with the discriminatory preferences of his landlord customers. A sample of 2,835 respondents representative of the US population was asked about which choice was the best, from a moral point of view: to allocate rental units exclusively to whichever group applied first (FCFS rule), to the other group or 50/50 to both groups. In two separate experiments, we manipulated (i) the order of arrival of the discriminated and non-discriminated groups, (ii) the income impact of implementing the FCFS rule for the rental agent, who risks losing landlord customers if they rent to the discriminated group, (iii) peer effects, i.e., what other rental agents do and (iv) social norms shared by all members of the community. Consistent with the literature, we find that the order of tenant arrival affects respondents’ normative preferences, and that, second to the 50/50 rule, the FCFS rule is well-received by respondents. Additionally, income, peer influence and social norms all causally impact the level of support for the FCFS rule among respondents. Finally, respondents who are more likely to experience economic hardship and belong to the dominant group in their neighbourhood are the least likely to support the FCFS rule.

While many western economies experienced substantial fluctuations in house prices since the turning of the century, the Irish residential market stands out as a particular case. Irish house prices experienced profound increases in the period leading up to the global financial crisis (GFC); thereafter the concomitant downturn in both the real Irish economy and financial sector precipitated a dramatic decline in prices between 2007 and 2012. However, since 2012 prices have increased in a sustained and persistent manner. A number of possible reasons are commonly cited for the recovery. In this paper we avail of a new housing and financial sector model, which are part of a broader macro-econometric model, COSMO, of the Irish economy to characterise the determinants of Irish house prices over the period 1995–2019 and in particular to examine the reasons for the post 2012 recovery. The suite of models are used to examine the contribution of developments in both monetary policy and financial stability as well as the performance of the real economy. The role played by the sluggish response of the supply-side of the Irish residential sector is also assessed. The supply-side of the Irish market was especially impacted by the GFC and has struggled to respond to the surge in housing demand which has accompanied the general economic recovery since 2012. Our results have interesting implications for the growing literature examining the intersection of monetary policy and financial stability on house prices.

This study investigates the influence of customer review content and other attributes on Airbnb listing prices, using data from listings across 26 U.S. regions. By integrating sentiment analysis and topic modeling with hedonic and quantile regression models, this paper examines the significant role of electronic word-of-mouth in the short-term rental market, by studying how review sentiments and topics affect pricing strategies. The findings reveal that negative reviews have twice the impact on listing prices as positive reviews; and fourfold for lower-priced listings. Moreover, the results of topic modeling show that both positive and negative reviews related to facilities and location have a larger impact on listing prices. Additionally, the study looks at how the distance of listings from the city center and the timing of reviews affect pricing adjustments. The influence of reviews diminishes for listings located farther from the city center, indicating that Airbnb listing prices near the city center are more sensitive to changes in price determinants. The study also uncovers the existence of a lag effect in how reviews impact prices, showing that Airbnb hosts may not adjust prices as quickly as hotel owners. Overall, the study enriches existing literature by taking into account the review content and type of customer reviews, offering a more comprehensive understanding of short-term rental pricing.

This paper analyzes online real estate listings to estimate the listing price elasticity of search activity for the individual seller for both the rental and sales market. This elasticity is an essential parameter in the literature modeling the process of selling a home, as it indicates the extend to which potential buyers will react to the listing price. Furthermore, we argue that our estimates are an approximation for the average price elasticity of demand facing the individual seller, which is an indication for the amount of competition in the market. A novel dataset tracking real estate advertisements on a daily basis allows to control for unobserved heterogeneity between properties by using property fixed effects, exploiting the variation caused by changes in listing prices and search behavior throughout the listing process. The findings indicate that a one percent increase in the listing price reduces search activity for the property by 6.7 percent for the sales market and 6.6 percent for the rental market. Additionally, we find that an increase in the number of listings in a market segment enhances the listing price elasticity.

We follow 3,826 Australian unemployed persons, approximately half of whom are homeowners. We conduct a matching analysis and find that homeownership reduces both experienced and perceived financial hardship. Building on recent findings in the literature that the presence of financial hardship deteriorates job search quality (i.e., stressors like financial hardship lead to the adoption of haphazard rather than focused job search strategies), we introduce financial hardship as a novel channel through which homeownership affects labour market outcomes of the unemployed. In our matching analysis, we include historical labour market performance and personality traits linked to mobility preferences, to address endogeneity. We also confirm that homeownership reduces residential mobility and increases neighbourhood social capital but find no effect on reservation wages of the unemployed. Considering declining homeownership rates across the OECD in recent years, our findings are both timely and imperative to understand the effect of homeownership on labour market outcomes of the unemployed.