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Working Paper
Automated Underwriting and Housing Market Dynamics
We study how the 1990s adoption of now widely-used automated mortgage underwriting systems affected credit supply, house prices and their comovement across locations. The effects go well beyond processing improvements. By implementing more complex, statistically-informed lending rules, the systems allowed households to borrow more, pushing up house prices. Furthermore, by transmitting a common set of credit standards across lenders, the new technology increased credit and house price synchronization. Together, our results illustrate how new lending technology can generate correlated credit ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Credit Supply and the Housing Boom
The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and household debt, the stability of debt relative to house values, and the fall in mortgage rates. These facts are difficult to reconcile with the popular view that attributes the housing boom to looser borrowing constraints associated with lower collateral requirements. In fact, a slackening of collateral ...
Journal Article
Home Prices Are Overvalued but Will Decline Only Gradually
The surge in home prices since the start of the pandemic and the sharp increase in interest rates during 2022 have made purchasing a home much less affordable. Homeownership costs relative to rents suggest home prices are considerably overvalued. However, relief is unlikely in the near future: owners have an incentive to remain in their current homes until rates decrease, mitigating downward pressure on prices.
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 ...
Journal Article
The Texas Housing Market
In a recent Southwest Economy, Dallas Fed economists D'Ann Petersen and Laila Assanie examine the Texas housing market. Another article, by the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, provides an in-depth analysis of Texas' housing affordability and how it differs across the state's metropolitan areas.
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 likely because closing was widely anticipated. Further, after airport closure, high income and white households moved into these locations and developers upgraded the quality of houses being built. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes had substantial effects on ...
Working Paper
The Effects of the Saving and Banking Glut on the U.S. Economy
We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in U.S. house prices and household debt that preceded the financial crisis. The key to these findings is that the model generates the sustained low level of interest rates observed over that period.
Journal Article
Increased real house price volatility signals break from Great Moderation
The shift toward more volatile real house price growth, unaccompanied by a shift in the volatility of real GDP growth, offers evidence that house price dynamics and real output growth may have diverged beginning around the 2001 recession.
Working Paper
Institutional Housing Investors and the Great Recession
Before the Great Recession, residential institutional investors predominantly bought and rented out condos, but then they increased their market share of rental houses from 17 percent in 2001 to 28 percent in 2018. Along with this change, rental survey data show that the annual house operating-cost premium of institutional investors relative to homeowners fell from 44 percent in 2001 to 28 percent in 2015. To measure how these reduced costs affected the housing bust of 2007–2011, I build a heterogeneous agent model of the housing market featuring corporate investors and two types of ...