Journal of Housing Economics最新文献

This paper provides new evidence on the incidence and theoretical predictions of housing allowances. It offers a comprehensive reexamination of allowance algorithms, to shed light on their objectives and impacts, while also addressing empirical modelling considerations and identifying limitations in literature. Notably, it offers readers a comparative analysis by investigating US vouchers as a reference point. Theoretically, I find housing allowances are typically neither a price nor income equivalent. Housing allowance schemes,mostly being universal in functional form across countries, manifest as personal subsidies inverse to resources i.e., some benefit amount minus income deduction. I discover that New Zealand's Accommodation Supplement (AS) manifests as a negative income and wealth tax benefit which, over time, is regressive to rents and incomes. Empirically, I estimate the effects of an increase in costs and demand for the AS on rents exploiting a panel of housing markets geocoded using census tracts at Area Unit (AU) level. The rent model extends, using Geographically Weighted Panel Regression (GWR) to control for any time-variant neighborhood spillover effects on rents. Costing NZ$ 5.225 billion over 2006–2013, AS for renters was not demand deterministic and had no significant direct impact on the revenues of low-income landlords. An increase in subsidy demand coincides with possible overcrowding whereas has no impact on increasing rental supply or a move into renting.

We analyze the effect of credit supply on households’ homeownership and home equity outcomes. Banking deregulation together with states’ autonomy to limit deregulation provides an exogenous shift in credit supply which shows variation across states and time. We find that a shift from full to no regulation increases the probability of homeownership by one percentage point, and of having a mortgage by two percentage points, explaining up to 43% of the increase in homeownership and the share of households with mortgages. Mortgage debt increases by up to 20%. Household leverage and debt exposure measured as debt to income ratio increase slightly for households outside of MSAs.

We study whether homeownership hinders labor force participation and increases unemployment. Using a unique dataset from the city of Brno, Czech Republic, we exploit housing reforms that followed the Velvet Revolution, and the subsequent fall of communism, as a source of exogenous assignment of homeownership. Across several estimation approaches, we do not find any evidence of homeownership hindering labor market activity. The estimated effects on labor force participation are around zero and our estimates for unemployment suggest that homeownership reduces it by four to six percentage points. Homeownership thus appears to benefit labor market performance.

This paper examines the causal effects of political uncertainty on housing markets. We used US gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2018 as a source of exogenous variation in political uncertainty and exploited the regional variations in residential housing markets. We used neighboring states without elections and counties at the state borders without elections as control groups. We found that higher political uncertainty causes (a) a decrease in house price growth; (b) a decrease in the number of housing transactions; and (c) an increase in the number of building permits. These effects are stronger during election years when election outcomes present higher uncertainty. We further examined the impact of political uncertainty on mortgage markets and found that mortgage demand and supply decrease in election years.

As human populations grow, one strategy for meeting housing demand is through the development of agricultural land and other open space, which can generate negative externalities. This may be addressed at local, state, or federal levels with land-use planning, including farmland preservation policies. Efficient land-use planning in the presence of competing land uses requires knowledge of development risk, housing preferences, and the full costs of farmland loss. We conduct a national scale hedonic analysis using the ZTRAX program U.S. housing transaction data to investigate how COVID-19 has affected property prices in suburban and rural areas with farmland at high risk of development, for the purpose of understanding the effects of COVID-19 driven shifts in housing location preferences. Our analysis demonstrates that the pandemic caused differential price impacts across the 33 states that we analyzed. Furthermore, our estimates suggest heterogeneous price effects driven by the characteristics of nearby urban areas, with prices appreciating faster on land at risk located near smaller urban areas than those near larger urban areas. Our analysis finds that the spatial pattern of development pressure on agricultural lands, as measured through transaction prices, changed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Industrial chemical accidents involving fires, explosions, or toxic vapors impose external costs on nearby communities. We examine changes in residential property values using nationwide data on chemical facilities, accidents, and residential transactions within a spatial difference-in-differences framework. We find that accidents with direct offsite impacts lower home values within 5.75 km by 2-3%, an effect that remains for about 10 to 12 years, on average. We estimate an average loss of $5,350 per home, which translates to a $39.5 billion loss to communities around the 661 facilities where an offsite impact accident occurred. We assess the assumptions needed for a formal welfare interpretation and conclude that these results roughly approximate losses experienced by nearby residents.

This paper examines the impact of two nationwide reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program on both flood insurance and property markets. The 2012 and 2014 reforms aimed to phase out subsidies on flood insurance premiums. Using a difference-in-differences framework comparing treated and similar but untreated properties, we find that the reforms led to a 14.3% relative increase in the price of flood insurance, an 8.2% decrease in insurance demand, a 4.2% decrease in property prices and a 2.3% decrease in property transaction volumes. As flood risk continues to accelerate across the United States, properly pricing insurance premiums can effectively discourage households from living in risky areas, but may involve potential trade-offs such as the unintended outcome of a large drop-off in insurance coverage.

This study provides the first direct empirical evidence on whether private school lottery enrollment program affects school district house prices and residential sorting behaviors. Although the new lottery enrollment policy for private schools in China aims to promote equal and affordable education, it also introduces uncertainty. We assessed the policy impact using the panel data of residential housing transactions from the largest real estate agent in Chengdu during 2018–2020 and controlling for grid-level demographic and economic variables from mobile Internet data. We found that the lottery-based private school enrollment uncertainty leads to a substantial rise in the value of the key and elite school district house (SDH) prices. The house price premiums of the key SDH and elite SDH increased by 2.8% and 7.8% in the post-policy period, respectively. We also observed a significant intensification of residential sorting behavior within the elite public school districts afterwards. These results suggest that parents pay higher house prices when access to quality private schools becomes uncertain.

“Teardown” or redevelopment is an effective policy tool to increase supply elasticity in land-scarce cities. In Singapore, redevelopment of older multi-family properties requires the consent of majority owners to sell their units collectively in a process widely known as “en bloc” sales. Using the resale transaction data in Singapore from 1995 to 2018, we find that private multi-family properties with redevelopment potentials sell at significant premiums of at least 36.7% on average. The resale values of properties with redevelopment potentials increase by 5.5% to 8.3% after the consent of the majority owners to sell the redevelopment rights is obtained. The anticipative effects are observed in resale transactions as early as one year before the en bloc sale events. The price premiums increase from 8.4% to 13.64% when resale transactions occur in 7 to 12 months and within 6 months from the en bloc event. The results are robust and orthogonal to supply constraints in the markets.

In discussions of the barriers faced by the poor to accessing high-quality K-12 education, housing costs figure prominently. A common view is that housing costs more when it provides access to higher quality schools. But is this view accurate? We investigate this question by relating housing affordability with two test-based measures of school quality, test score levels and rates of student learning. Our work contributes the first nationwide estimate of this relationship for rates of student learning, and to date the most comprehensive nationwide examination for test score levels. We find that there are relatively few affordable housing options near high test score levels schools, but for a substantial range this is driven by the phasing from renter into owner-occupied housing, and the associated rise in down payments. By contrast, the association of housing affordability with learning rates is much weaker. We examine heterogeneity in these relationships, and discuss policy implications.