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Working Paper
Can Measurement Error Explain Slow Productivity Growth in Construction?
Of all major industries, construction is the only one to have registered negative average productivity growth since 1987. One might suspect measurement error to have biased growth downward since the deflators for this sector, which are used to translate nominal construction spending into the real quantity of structures, have risen much faster than those for other sectors. We find evidence of an upward bias in these deflators related to unobserved improvements in structure quality, but the magnitude is not large enough to alter the view that construction-sector productivity growth has been ...
Working Paper
Changing Stability in U.S. Employment Relationships: A Tale of Two Tails
We examine how the distribution of employment tenure has changed in aggregate and for various demographic groups, drawing links to trends in job stability and satisfaction. The fraction of workers with short tenure (less than a year) has been falling since at least the mid-1990s, consistent with the decline in job changing documented over this period. The decline in short-tenure was widespread across demographic groups, industry, and occupation. It appears to be associated with fewer workers cycling among briefly-held jobs and coincides with an increase in perceived job security among short ...
Working Paper
The post-foreclosure experience of U.S. households
Despite the recent flood of foreclosures on residential mortgages, little is known about what happens to borrowers and their households after their mortgage has been foreclosed. We study the post-foreclosure experience of U.S. households using a unique dataset based on the credit reports of a large panel of individuals to from 1999 to 2010. Although foreclosure considerably raises the probability of moving, the majority of post-foreclosure migrants do not end up in substantially less desirable neighborhoods or more crowded living conditions. These results suggest that, on average, foreclosure ...
Working Paper
Understanding Declining Fluidity in the U.S. Labor Market
We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend. It is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, the decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker-firm matching, the formalization of hiring practices, or an increase in ...
Working Paper
Long-Term Vacancy in the United States
Because housing is durable, the housing supply is slow to adapt to declines in demand. This paper uses long-term vacancy--defined as nonseasonal housing units that have been vacant for an unusually long period of time--to quantify the extent of excess supply in the housing market. I find that long-term vacancy is less than 2 percent of all nonseasonal housing units and accounts for only one quarter of the aggregate increase in nonseasonal vacancy from 2001 to 2011. Thus, at the national level, excess supply is considerably less extensive than indicated by traditional measures of vacancy. ...
Working Paper
Measuring Aggregate Housing Wealth : New Insights from an Automated Valuation Model
We construct a new measure of aggregate U.S. housing wealth based on Zillow's Automated Valuation Model (AVM). AVMs offer advantages over other methods because they are based on recent market transaction prices, utilize large datasets which include property characteristics and local geographic variables, and are updated frequently with little lag. However, using Zillow's AVM to measure aggregate housing wealth requires overcoming several challenges related to the representativeness of the Zillow sample. We propose methods that address these challenges and generate a new estimate of aggregate ...
Working Paper
The effect of gasoline prices on household location
Gasoline prices influence where households decide to locate by changing the cost of commuting. Consequently, the substantial increase in gas prices since 2003 may have reduced the demand for housing in areas far from employment centers, leading to a decrease in the price and/or quantity of housing in those locations relative to locations closer to jobs. Using annual panel data on ZIP codes and municipalities in a large number of metropolitan areas of the United States from 1981 to 2008, we find that a 10 percent increase in gas prices leads to a 10 percent decrease in construction after 4 ...
Working Paper
Changing Stability in U.S. Employment Relationships: A Tale of Two Tails
We confront two seemingly-contradictory observations about the US labor market: the rate at which workers change employers has declined since the 1980s, yet there is a commonly expressed view that long-term employment relationships are more difficult to attain. We reconcile these observations by examining how the distribution of employment tenure has changed in aggregate and for various demographic groups. We show that the fraction of workers with short tenure (less than a year) has been falling since the 1980s, consistent with the decline in job changing. Meanwhile, the fraction of workers ...
Working Paper
Housing Supply and Affordability: Evidence from Rents, Housing Consumption and Household Location
We examine how housing supply constraints affect housing affordability, which we define as the quality-adjusted price of housing services. In our dynamic model, supply constraints increase the price of housing services by only half has much as the purchase price of a home, since the purchase price responds to expected future increases in rent as well as contemporaneous rent increases. Households respond to changes in the price of housing services by altering their housing consumption and location choices, but only by a small amount. We evaluate these predictions using common measures of ...
Working Paper
The housing crisis and state and local government tax revenue: five channels
State and local government tax revenues dropped steeply following the most severe housing market contraction since the Great Depression. We identify five main channels through which the housing market affects state and local tax revenues: property tax revenues, transfer tax revenues, sales tax revenues (including a direct effect through construction materials and an indirect effect through the link between housing wealth and consumption), and personal income tax revenues. We find that property tax revenues do not tend to decrease following house price declines. We conclude that the resilience ...