Journal of Housing Economics最新文献

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We estimate the effect of Mexico's primary house-purchase subsidy program for low-income individuals on house prices between 2008 and 2019, using administrative records from Infonavit, the nation's largest mortgage originator. We employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that leverages the existence of a threshold on the borrower's income that determined access to the subsidy program to identify the effect on house prices. Our estimations yield statistically significant evidence that the subsidy led to an average increase in house prices of 863 US dollars for the program participants at the threshold during those years. This effect represents 28.9 % of the average subsidy amount and 5.4 % of the average house price. The estimations control for individual, house, and location characteristics. Furthermore, we find evidence that when an intermediary is involved in the mortgage application process, there is a statistically significant price difference of 867 dollars for subsidy recipients. On the contrary, this impact disappears when no external broker is involved. These intermediaries are primarily real estate developers that build and sell the houses associated with the mortgages. These findings shed light on how market structure could have nonnegligible impacts on equilibrium outcomes and on the welfare effects of economic policy.