Search Results
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.
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
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
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 ...
Working Paper
The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890–2006
We construct the first consistent market rent and home sales price series for American cities across the 20th century using millions of newspaper real estate listings. Our findings revise several stylized facts about U.S. housing markets. Real market rents did not fall during the 20th century for most cities. Instead, real rental price levels increased by about 20 percent from 1890 to 2006. There was also greater growth in real housing sales prices from 1965 to 1995 than is commonly understood. Using these series, we document several new facts about housing markets. The return to ...
Persistence of house-price growth highlights geographic, credit factors
Growth in house prices is highly persistent and therefore more predictable than that of other assets, such as stocks.
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
Land-Use Regulations, Property Values, and Rents: Decomposing the Effects of the California Coastal Act
REVISED MARCH 2018 Land-use regulations can lower real estate prices by imposing costs on property owners, but may raise prices by restricting supply and generating amenities. We study the effects of the California Coastal Act, one of the nation?s most stringent land-use regulations, on prices and rents for multifamily housing units. The Coastal Act applies to a narrow section of the California coast, allowing us to compare properties on either side of the jurisdictional boundary. The Coastal Act offers several advantages for measuring the effects of land-use regulations, including plausible ...
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
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 ...