Journal of Housing Economics最新文献

Employing parcel-level data on vacant houses in a depopulating city in the Tokyo metropolitan area, we provide the evidence of negative externalities of long-term vacant houses that persist for several years. Ownership of a vacant house continues, whereas the level of maintenance declines; thus, the Japanese context enables us to simply capture the long-run impact of neglect, separate from the foreclosure stigma in the US context. We find that the externality spills over to approximately 50 m and that one additional long-term vacant house within 50 m pushes property transaction prices down by approximately 3%. We argue that the externalities come at least partly from the disamenity channel, since they are not observed for vacancies that disappear within one or two years. Externalities are observed from three years after the houses become vacant, which are, often not put on the housing market, and the externalities diminish around the time the vacancies finally disappear. We also show that externalities exist only in areas where nearby long-term vacant houses are not yet common, as their existence stands out in those areas. These results imply that reducing the number of long-term vacant houses will help mitigate disamenities in areas that have not yet experienced severe declines.

The Community Rating System (CRS) program was implemented by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1990 as an optional program to encourage communities to voluntarily engage in flood mitigation initiatives. This paper uses national census tract-level data from 1990 to 2010 to estimate whether CRS participation affects housing development patterns. Our results show that participating in the CRS is associated with reduced rates of new housing construction and mobile homes in flood-prone areas. When we separate flood mitigation activities under the CRS program into information-based and regulation-based activities, we find that regulatory approaches are more effective than informational approaches. These results show a general pattern, nationwide and across decades, of community-scale flood management efforts deterring housing development in flood-prone areas.

I use daily and weekly data from 100 metropolitan areas in 2020 to investigate the effects of state-level policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic on various indicators of U.S. housing market activity. Measures of housing market activity include change in new listings, total inventory, newly pending sales, median list price, web traffic to for-sale homes, and average number of days to pending sale status. Using event study and difference-in-differences models, I find that the closure of non-essential businesses in certain states was associated with up to an 11-percentage point decrease in new home listings and a 3.5 percentage point decrease in total inventory relative to the same period in 2019. I also find that school closures may affect some outcomes.

This paper develops and solves a spatiotemporal equilibrium model in which regional wages and house prices are jointly determined with location-to-location migration flows. The agent’s optimal location choice and the resultant migration process are shown to be Markovian, with the transition probabilities across all location pairs given as non-linear functions of wage and housing cost differentials, endogenously responding to migration flows. The model can be used for the analysis of spatial distribution of population, income, and house prices, as well as for spatiotemporal impulse response analysis. The model is estimated on a panel of 48 mainland U.S. states and the District of Columbia using the training sample (1976–1999), and shown to fit the data well over the evaluation sample (2000–2014). The estimated model is then used to analyze the size and speed of spatial spill-over effects by computing spatiotemporal impulse responses of positive productivity and land-supply shocks to California, Texas, and Florida. Our simulation results show that states with a lower level of land-use regulation can benefit more from positive state-specific productivity shocks; and positive land-supply shocks are much more effective in states, such as California, that are subject to more stringent land-use regulations.

We conducted a correspondence test to identify the determinants and extent of ethnic discrimination in the market for shared housing in Germany. We establish a link between information about an applicant’s personality and her performance in the housing market. About 2,000 fictitious applications with randomly assigned German-, or Turkish-sounding, female or male names, with or without additional personality information were sent to vacant room ads. While the callback rate for German-sounding names is 52 percent, it drops to 37 percent for Turkish-sounding names. Female applicants receive significantly more callbacks than their male counterparts. Additional personality information is particularly beneficial to the group with the highest callback rate (German females) and the group with the lowest callback rate (Turkish males). Thus, personality information reduce the ethnic gap between Turkish and German males, whereas the gap among females increases. A simple theoretical model shows that the strong effect of information on German females can be explained by aggregation over rooms that differ in market tightness. Moreover, advertisers who only accept applications of one particular gender discriminate significantly more against Turkish applicants.

Housing subsidies are aimed at helping low-income individuals afford appropriate housing, but are costly to offer and, in the view of some experts and policy makers, reduce incentives for claimants to participate in the labour market. This paper investigates the labour market impacts of recent housing subsidy cuts in England that were aimed at encouraging labour market participation and increasing work effort among claimants. I utilise variation in exposure to the subsidy cuts within a difference-in-differences framework and find limited evidence at the individual-level that claimants increased employment and labour force participation in response to the subsidy cuts. Nonetheless, these findings lack robustness and aggregate-level evidence suggests that the subsidy cuts did not succeed in encouraging employment or participation among claimants. Overall, my results show that labour market responses to the subsidy cuts were likely preempted by a strong mobility response, whereby claimants moved into other parts of the rental market to maintain subsidy coverage.

The impact of public housing plans on local development is a neglected, although potentially important, issue. Here, we consider the impact of a public housing supply shock in a spatial equilibrium model and show that a larger local availability of houses can trigger industrialization by raising the number of residents. Also, the model suggests that this mechanism is stronger in places that exhibited, prior to the public housing plan, relatively higher population density. These implications are confirmed by the evidence we find from the INA-Casa plan, a program implemented by the Italian government in the aftermath of WWII.

Uninformed buyers may pay more when purchasing complex assets, such as houses. This paper compares local house buyers who are later foreclosed with those not foreclosed for various buyer-types, namely, owner-occupier households, investor-companies, second-home buyers, and small-scale investors. Data from one of the foreclosure epicenters, Orange County, Florida, reveal that subsequent foreclosures are associated with higher prices for comparable housing at the time of purchase. The premium paid by buyers between 2000 and 2007 who experience foreclosure after 2007 is larger closer to the 2007 market peak, approaching 3 percent. We find considerable heterogeneity across buyer-types. In particular, foreclosed second-home buyers and small-scale investors systematically pay more, while investor-companies and owner-occupiers do not. The pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that the premium paid by foreclosed households reflects poor information or limited financial acumen.

This study finds that location matters more for children of parents with low educational attainment than for children of more educated parents. Specifically, children of parents without a high school diploma are statistically more likely to be enrolled in high schools or colleges in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) where the college graduate share is higher. The statistical relationship between a child's school enrollment and the MSA's college graduate share becomes weaker as their parents’ educational attainment increases. We also find that the least educated households are significantly less likely to be homeowners and are more likely to pay greater housing costs as a share of income in cities with higher college graduate shares, indicating that these households are paying a high price to live in high-skilled cities. Our results imply that the increasing lack of housing affordability in high-skilled cities makes it more difficult for households with less educational attainment to stay in or move to these places, contributing to intergenerational education inequality.