Search Results
Essay
Arrival of Interstate Highway System Brought Housing Wealth, but to Whom?
Interstate highways increased household wealth through higher house values, but racial inequities in homeownership meant few residents of color reaped these gains.
Journal Article
Measuring Household Distress and Potential Policy Impacts
Government policies such as income support and debt relief may help explain low levels of household financial distress, but outcomes are uncertain once assistance ends.
Working Paper
Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics
We examine homeowner vacancy rate interdependencies over time and space through the channel of migration. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating interregional spillovers due to some households’ desires to migrate between regions and by allowing for regime-switching behavior. Our empirical analysis of vacancy rates for the entire U.S. and for Census regions provides visual evidence for the possibility of regime-switching behavior. We explicitly test our model by estimating basic Vector Autoregression (VAR) and ...
Working Paper
Spatial hedonic models of airport noise, proximity, and housing prices
Despite the refrain that housing prices are determined by "location, location, and location," no prior studies of airport noise and housing prices have incorporated spatial econometric techniques. We compare various spatial econometric models and estimation methods in a hedonic price framework to examine the impact of noise on 2003 housing values near the Atlanta airport. Spatial effects are best captured by a model including both spatial autocorrelation and autoregressive parameters estimated by a generalized moments approach. The inclusion of spatial effects magnifies the negative price ...
Working Paper
Negative Externalities and Real Asset Prices: Closing of Stapleton Airport and Effect on Nearby Housing Markets
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. We examine the effects of Stapleton airport?s closing on nearby, Denver housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory effects on prices upon announcement of the closing, but no price changes at closing likely because it was widely anticipated. However, we find that high income and white households delayed moving into these locations until after the airport?s closing. Also, developers upgraded the quality of houses being built after closing. Further, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock ...
Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing and little evidence of upward trending prices between announcement and closing. However, after airport closure, more higher income and fewer black households moved into these locations, and developers built higher quality houses. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes ...
Journal Article
Auctions as a vehicle to reduce airport delays and achieve value capture
Congestion at airports imposes large costs on airlines and their passengers. A key reason for congestion is that an airline schedules its flights without regard to the costs imposed on other airlines and their passengers. As a result, during some time intervals, airlines schedule more flights to and from an airport than that airport can accommodate and flights are delayed. This paper explores how a specific market-based proposal by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which includes the use of auctions to determine the right to arrive or depart in a specific time interval at airports in ...
Working Paper
National and Regional Housing Vacancy: Insights Using Markov-switching Models
We examine homeowner vacancy rates over time and space using Markov-switching models. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating regime-switching behavior and interregional spillovers. Our approach is strongly supported by our empirical results. Estimations, using constant-only as well as Vector Autoregressions, allow us to examine differences in vacancy rates as well as explore the possibility of asymmetries within and across housing markets, depending on the state/regime (e.g., low or high vacancy) of a given housing market. ...
Journal Article
How Might Transforming Highways Impact Community Wealth?
Cities are rethinking what the highway system might look like. How might changes impact wealth, and how might a history of racial inequities be addressed?
Working Paper
Traffic Noise in Georgia: Sound Levels and Inequality
Using Lorenz-type curves, means tests, ordinary least squares, and locally weighted regressions (LWR), we examine the relative burdens of whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Georgia from road and air traffic noise. We find that whites bear less noise than either blacks or Hispanics and that blacks tend to experience more traffic noise than Hispanics. While every Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) showed that blacks experienced relatively more noise than average, such a result did not hold for Hispanics in roughly half of the MSAs. We find much heterogeneity across Census tracts using LWR. For ...