Journal of Housing Economics最新文献

This paper investigates the impact of changes in lending limits on household leverage and housing choices. Using credit registry data and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy we determine how a change in the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio - a macroprudential policy tool - affected constrained households. Our results show that the policy change was effective in reducing households' leverage as constrained households took out smaller loans and had lower loan-to-income ratios. Such households also paid higher interest rate spreads and had higher loan-service-to-income ratios than the control group. Finally, we also show that the policy change affected households' housing choices, as constrained households bought less expensive houses. Our results highlight the improvement of the risk profile of households following the introduction of the LTV limits.

We study the effects of crime and agglomeration on the value of urban amenities using data for 134 locations in New Zealand and report three key findings. First, the negative effects of crime operate mostly via rents, with elasticities that range from $-$0.15 to $-$0.44. Accounting for endogeneity leads to larger elasticities in most specifications, possibly due to sorting effects. Second, crime has negative effects on the value of urban amenities, with elasticities that range from approximately $-$0.03 to $-$0.06 for firms and $-$0.02 to $-$0.09 for workers. Using reduced-form models, we show that these effects imply an elasticity of population with respect to crime of $-$0.04 to $-$0.10. Third, controlling for crime causes estimates of agglomeration economies to increase by approximately 0.01–0.02 points, on average. Our findings confirm that crime is an important urban congestion cost that erodes productivity and well-being.

This paper investigates the relative importance and effect of conventional and unconventional Canadian monetary policy surprises on housing prices. Using a credible approach to identify structural monetary policy shocks in Canada and a comprehensive Bayesian VAR model to analyze their effects on financial and macroeconomic variables, we find that both conventional monetary policy and quantitative easing shocks have a significant and persistent effect on housing prices in Canada. However, the inflationary effect of a quantitative easing shock is more pronounced than that of an easing target monetary policy surprise. Specifically, the peak effect of a 25-basis point expansionary conventional monetary policy shock is a 2.30% increase in real housing prices while a comparable quantitative easing surprise leads to a peak of 4.56% increase in real housing prices. We conclude that expansionary monetary policy in various forms has had significant inflationary effects on Canadian housing prices. But quantitative easing surprises stand out as the most prominent contributory factor to the escalating Canadian real estate price. Quantitative easing impact consistently outweighs the effects of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy shocks.

Using data from the Household Pulse Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we show that COVID-19 vaccination mitigates households’ payment difficulty and that there is a positive causal relationship between the vaccination and housing rent/mortgage payment confidence. We attribute these findings to an economic recovery channel. Specifically, the vaccination results in improvement of economic activities and reduction in job losses and households’ anxiety, worry, and depression. Moreover, our results identify some racial, occupational, and regional disparities. The positive causal relationship between the vaccination and housing payments is more pronounced for black households, self-employed and non-teleworking households, and Southern households.

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? To answer this question, we need to identify the effects of rent control. This study reviews a large empirical literature investigating the impact of rent controls on various socioeconomic and demographic aspects. Rent controls appear to be quite effective in terms of slowing the growth of rents paid for dwellings subject to control. However, this policy also leads to a wide range of adverse effects affecting the whole society.

We introduce a new way to measure the stringency of housing regulation. Rather than a standard regulatory index or a single aspect of regulation like Floor Area Ratio, we draw on cities’ self-reported estimates of their total zoned capacity for new housing. This measure, available to us as a result of state legislation in California, offers a more accurate way to assess local antipathy towards new housing, and also offers a window into how zoning interacts with existing buildout. We show, in regressions analyzing new housing permitting, that our measure has associations with new supply that are as large or larger than conventional, survey-based indexes of land use regulation. Moreover, unbuilt zoning capacity interacts with rent to predict housing production in ways conventional measures do not. Specifically, interacting our measure with rent captures the interplay of regulation and demand: modest deregulation in high-demand cities is associated with substantially more housing production than substantial deregulation in low-demand cities. These findings offer a more comprehensive explanation for the historically low levels of housing production in high cost metros.

This paper employs a boundary discontinuity design to separate the cost of easy access (EA) to urban parks from the combined effects of proximity.¹ On average, houses with EA to urban parks experience a significant price reduction of 2.0%. This reduction equals approximately $7,986 per house in 2018 dollars, all else being equal. The average negative effect originates from EA to city parks. Mechanism analysis using novel cellphone data reveals that frequent visits to areas with EA to urban parks can lead to congestion disamenities that have a negative effect on the prices of EA houses.

While housing choice vouchers provide significant benefits to households who successfully lease homes with their vouchers, many recipients fail to do so. Understanding more about lease-up rates is critical, yet the latest national study was published over two decades ago and reported on the outcomes of only 2,600 voucher recipients across 48 housing authorities (Finkel and Buron, 2001). We use unique administrative data to estimate voucher lease-up rates and search times for about 85,000 new voucher recipients each year in 433 metropolitan housing authorities for 2015 to 2019, which allows us to explore variation over time, across housing agencies, and across individuals within housing agencies. Overall, only 60 percent of recipients successfully use their vouchers, even after waiting for two and a half years on average to receive them. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we show that lease-up rates are generally lower in markets with lower vacancy rates, more spatial variation in rent levels, and older housing, which may be less able to pass HUD’s quality standards. But we also find considerable variation across individuals within markets. Most notably, perhaps, we find that Black and Hispanic voucher recipients are less likely to lease homes than other recipients in their same markets. We explore mechanisms and find evidence that racial disparities are partly explained by differing conditions in the neighborhoods where voucher recipients start: voucher recipients are less likely to lease-up and take longer to successfully rent homes when they start in neighborhoods with older housing stocks and larger Black and Hispanic population shares. Observed and unobserved neighborhood factors explain about 40 percent of individual racial differences in lease-up rates. We also provide suggestive evidence showing that policy interventions, such as extended search times, neighborhood-based rent ceilings, and source of income discrimination laws, can help both to boost overall lease-up rates and to reduce these racial and spatial disparities.

This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of retirement on housing choices. Our empirical strategy exploits the discontinuity in the eligibility ages for state pension as an instrument for the endogenous retirement decision and controls for time-invariant individual characteristics. The results show that retirement leads to a statistically significant and sizable increase in the probability of making a residential move or the likelihood of becoming outright homeowners. We also find that individuals downsize both physically and financially and tend to move to better neighbourhoods or closer to the coast upon retirement. We additionally discover that some housing adjustments take place up to 6 years before retirement. Moreover, our results reveal significant heterogeneity in the retirement impact by gender, marital status, education, housing tenue, income and wealth. Within traditional heterosexual couple households, housing mobility choices are primarily influenced by the wife's retirement while housing downsizing decisions are only affected by the husband's retirement.