Three Essays on Housing and Labor Economics PDF Download

Author: XUE HU
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

View

Book Description
These essays contribute towards our understanding of housing and labor economics. This dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of negative housing equity on households' geo- graphical mobility using data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The empirical analysis implies that addressing the endogeneity nature of homeowners' underwater mortgage status is crucial. Even with comprehensive controls for households' demographic characteristics and macro-level factors, omitted variable bias such as homeowners' attitudes towards their financial responsibility may still generate estimation bias that is quite large. After proper instrumenting for homeowners' underwater mortgage status using local shocks from housing and labor markets, the estimation results show that having underwater mortgages is associated with an average decline in mobility rate of about 17 percentage points. The second chapter investigates the role of housing choice and mortgage on employment transitions when there are uncertainties regarding income and house prices. Motivated by the empirical evidence on large employment-transition disparities between homeowners and renters, I develop and estimate a structural model in which mortgage obligations motivate homeowners to exert greater job-search efforts during unemployment spells. The model is used to understand individuals' response to housing and labor market shocks. I find that while the decline in house prices creates negative labor market externalities for renters, tightening mortgage constraints result in greater job search incentives for homeowners. With concurrent negative labor market shocks, the probability of transitioning out of unemployment for both renters and homeowners declines. Two policy experiments are conducted. The first shows that lower refinance cost discourages housing equity accumulation and is associated with a decline in the average employment rate. The second demonstrates that a lower down payment requirement encourages the transition into home ownership, which has positive labor market implications, especially for younger individuals. The first two chapters explore the relation between underwater mortgage and geographical mobility and impacts of mortgage debt obligation on employment incentives. Both analyses are based on individual-level data. The last chapter investigates the mysteries of regional housing market disparities from a macro perspective. This chapter shows that local economic conditions are correlated with deviations between house prices and rents in a price-rent model framework, suggesting that the demand for credit and housing is greater when a variety of local economic conditions are more supportive. Several different measures of local economic conditions are considered in this chapter: local unemployment rates, local unemployment rates relative to the natural rate of unemployment, local inflation rates, and measures of local perceptions of the cost of credit. This chapter attempts to offer explanations not as how or why house prices increased, but rather, given the myriad of national factors making home purchase easier and cheaper, where house prices increased. This approach also resolves a bit of a puzzle as to why the housing bubble was so pronounced in some areas and not others.

Author: Zongjin Qian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
The first chapter is joint with Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade. We investigate the consequences of the 1994 rent-control expansion in San Francisco on tenants, landlords, and equilibrium outcomes in the rental market. Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find rent control limits renters' mobility by 20\% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15\% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply drove up market rents in the long run by 5.1\%, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. Using a dynamic, neighborhood choice model, we find rent control offered large benefits to covered tenants. Welfare losses from decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against rent increases were provided as government social insurance, instead of a regulated landlord mandate. The second chapter consists of my job-market paper, joint with Rose Tan. We investigate the consequences of high-skilled firm entry on nearby affected neighborhoods and incumbent residents living in those neighborhoods. To study this, we construct a dataset of 391 such entries in the U.S. from 1990--2010. We follow incumbent residents over 13 years using rich micro-data on individual address histories, property characteristics, and financial records. First, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents' consumption, finances, and mobility. To do so, we compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away, while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites. Next, we decompose welfare from changes in wages, rents, and amenities for incumbent residents using a model of individual home and work location choice. Taken together, our results show high-skilled incumbents, especially homeowners, benefit. Low-skilled owners benefit less than high-skilled owners. Low-skilled renters are harmed. In the medium to long run, they incur an annual welfare loss that is equivalent to a 0.2 percent decline in their wages one year prior to the entry. While the typical high-skilled firm entry has moderate welfare consequences on a per capita basis, the negative welfare consequences for low-skilled renters could be large for some more extreme firm entries. Housing assistance in the form of affordable housing and rental insurance, as well as property tax scheme could be used to mitigate the negative distributional consequences of high-skilled firm entries. The third chapter is joint with Haaris Mateen and Ye Zhang. We study the microstructure of the U.S. housing market using a novel data set comprising housing search and bargaining behavior for millions of interactions between sellers and buyers. We first establish a number of stylized facts, the most prominent being a nearly 50--50 split between houses that sold below final listing price and those that sold above final listing price. Second, we compare observed behavior with predictions from a large theoretical housing literature. Many predictions on the relationship between sales price, time on the market, listing price and atypicality are borne out in the data. However, existing models do not adequately explain the spread of the sales price around the final listing price. Using a modeling strategy that treats listing price changes as revisions of expectations about the sales price, we find sellers under-react to information shocks in estimating the sales price. Last, we find that the bargaining outcomes are influenced by previously undocumented buyers' bid characteristics, e.g., financing contingencies and escalation clauses, that signal a buyer's ability to complete or expedite the transaction. This suggests an important role for buyer bid characteristics, which are not explained by existing theories, in affecting bargaining power and surplus allocation in bilateral bargaining in housing transactions.

Author: Stylianos Christodoulou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
"This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the effectiveness of targeted rental subsidies and their impact on neighborhoods. The second chapter studies the impact that local labor market composition changes have on local post-secondary institutions. The last chapter analysis how worker whose abilities are underestimated or overestimated choose occupations when employers differ in the speed in which they learn about workers. Despite the benefits of residing in low-poverty neighborhoods, rental assistance recipients are disproportionately located in high-poverty neighborhoods. However, it is unclear whether efforts to promote their relocation will be successful or whether it will introduce adverse effects on neighborhoods. Using a novel treatment magnitude in a triple difference design that leverages a reform to the largest rental assistance program in the US, this paper finds a significant causal effect on the number of rental assistance recipients residing in each neighborhood that varies across broad geographical areas. Furthermore, this study finds improvements in recipients' average neighborhood quality of residence, with the effects remaining significant 5 years after the reform. Lastly, no evidence of adverse effects on neighborhoods were found as measured by home appreciation rates. The second chapter examines the responsiveness of major specific completions to its employment share at the local level. The dynamic effect is identified by exploiting quasi-random variation that is constructed using shift-share instruments which leverage both changes in the occupational composition and the composition of majors within occupations at the national level. Using data for the time period of 2009-2018, the results suggest a significant response of the major choice to changes in the local labor market with the effect being largest between freshman and sophomore years. A decomposition of the effect suggests a larger response to changes in the occupational composition than to changes in the major composition within occupations. The third chapter studies occupational decisions when workers' abilities are overestimated or underestimated and employer differ in the speed in which they learn about workers, which is called employer learning rate. Due to asymmetric information, individuals who are more (less) productive than what their observables reveal, will be underpaid (overpaid) at the beginning of their careers. In this paper, I develop a two-period, two-occupation model which analyzes the occupational decisions in an asymmetric information game where workers differ on whether their productivity was underestimated or overestimated and occupations are heterogeneous with respect to an employer learning rate proxy. Lastly, I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and Current Population Survey (CPS) Merged Outgoing Rotation Group(MORG) to directly test model predictions separately for workers with less than college degree education and for college graduates."--Pages vii-viii.

Author: Andrea Camilli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789177310853
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Daniel Ringo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : College attendance
Languages : en
Pages : 96

View

Book Description
"This dissertation contributes to two literatures: Urban Economics and Labor Economics. In the first chapter I estimate the effect of home ownership on individual workers' unemployment and wage growth, as well as other labor market outcomes. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to relocate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. To elaborate on this hypothesis, credited to Oswald (1996), I build a simple search model and obtain a set of labor market predictions to test. The current microeconomic literature has reached mixed results regarding home ownership's impact, with most studies concluding that home ownership reduces unemployment. I show that the instruments used are likely to be invalid because of, among other reasons, Tiebout (1956) type sorting into housing markets. I use an instrumental variable free of the endogeneity present in other work: the county level home ownership rate when and where the worker grew up. This IV affects workers' preferences for housing but not, conditional on my covariates, their labor market ability. My results indicate that home ownership is a significant hindrance to mobility, and homeowners suffer longer unemployment spells and slower wage growth because of it. In the second chapter I use a dynamic model of neighborhood choice to estimate household preferences over the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood. I focus on the racial mix, average income and housing price level of a neighborhood, and whether households prefer neighbors that are similar to themselves. Identification of these preferences is complicated by the social aspect of neighborhood amenities. A household's valuation of a particular choice (neighborhood) is a function of the choices other households in the market have made and will make in the future. I show that demographic characteristics of a neighborhood are therefore endogenous to neighborhood quality. Standard estimates of preferences over neighbors may be biased by the presence of such unobservable local amenities. I develop a framework to correct this problem based on a careful delineation of the information households could have access to before and after they make their decisions. The model I build has the advantage over the literature of being able to produce self-consistent predictions about demographic changes. I deal with the low frequency of observations in my data set, the decennial census, by simulating local housing markets between data collection periods. After controlling for type-specific preferences for the physical amenities of neighborhoods, I find a universal preference for higher income neighbors. In contrast to much of the literature, my results suggest white households have no aversion to minority neighbors. In the third chapter I estimate the effect of parental credit scores on the child's probability of attending and completing college. Parents in the US are increasingly supplementing the student loans available to their children with unsecured debt in their own name. This is the first paper on this topic to make use of direct observations of credit scores, rather than rely on proxies such as wealth shocks. I find that good parental credit significantly improves the child's probability of attending college, with a smaller (although still significant) effect on the probability of completing a four-year degree. I provide evidence that the estimated relationship is causal and not biased by, for example, unobserved ability. Additionally, I show that credit scores may affect attendance through channels other than access to the student loan market. I hypothesize households substitute the potential to borrow for precautionary savings"--Pages iii-iv.

Author: Christopher John Palmer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206

View

Book Description
The first chapter consists of my job-market paper. The foreclosure rate of sub-prime mortgages increased markedly across 2003-2007 borrower cohorts-sub-prime mortgages originated in 2006- 2007 were roughly three times more likely to default within three years of origination than mortgages originated in 2003-2004. Many have argued that this surge in sub-prime defaults represents a deterioration in sub-prime lending standards over time. I quantify the importance of an alternative hypothesis: later cohorts defaulted at higher rates in large part because house price declines left them more likely to have negative equity. Using loan-level data, I find that changing borrower and loan characteristics explain approximately 30% of the difference in cohort default rates, with almost of all of the remaining heterogeneity across cohorts attributable to the price cycle. To account for the endogeneity of prices, I employ a nonlinear instrumental-variables approach that instruments for house price changes with long-run regional variation in house-price cyclicality. Control function results confirm that the relationship between price declines and defaults is causal and explains the majority of the disparity in cohort performance. I conclude that if 2006 borrowers had faced the same prices the average 2003 borrower did, their annual default rate would have dropped from 12% to 5.6%. The second chapter is joint with David Autor and Parag Pathak. Externalities from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods are central to the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the sudden and largely unanticipated 1995 elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had previously muted landlords' incentives to invest in their properties and altered the assignment of residents to locations. Pooling administrative data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of all Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol genrated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for an estimated 30 percent of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period. The majority of this contribution is due to induced appreciation of never-controlled properties, while residential investments can explain only a small fraction of the total. The third chapter is joint with Denis Chetverikov and Bradley Larsen. We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Standard quantile regression techniques are inconsistent in this setting, even if the treatment is exogenous. Using the Bahadur representation of quantile estimators, we derive weak conditions on the growth of the number of observations per group that are sufficient for consistency and asymptotic normality. Simulations confirm the superiority of this grouped instrumental variables quantile regression estimator to standard quantile regression. An empirical application finds that low-wage earners in the U.S. from 1990-2007 were significantly more affected by increased Chinese import competition than high-wage earners. We also illustrate the usefulness of the estimation approach with additional empirical examples from urban economics, labor, regulation, and empirical auctions. Chapter 1 Keywords: Mortgage Finance, Sub-prime Lending, Foreclosure Crisis, Negative Equity Chapter. 2 Keywords: Urban Economics, Residential Externalities, Rent Control, Price Regulations. Chapter 3 Keywords: Quantile Regression, Instrumental Variables, Panel Data, Wage Inequality, Import Competition. Chapter 1 JEL Classification: GOl, G21, R31, R38. Chapter 2 JEL Classification: D61, H23, R23, R31, R32, R38 Chapter 3 JEL. Classification: C21, C31, C33, C36, J30.

Author: William Cochrane
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811592756
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 237

View

Book Description
This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.

Author: Karl E. Case
Publisher: Lincoln Inst of Land Policy
ISBN: 9781558441842
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

View

Book Description
Based on the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy, this is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation's system of housing finance.

Author: Antoine Goujard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.

Author: Matt Notowidigdo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226

View

Book Description
This thesis studies the economics of local labor markets. There are three chapters in the thesis, and each chapter studies how economic outcomes are affected by local labor market conditions. The first chapter studies the incidence of local labor demand shocks. This chapter starts from the observation that low-skill workers are comparatively immobile. When labor demand slumps in a city, college-educated workers tend to relocate whereas non college workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. A standard explanation of these facts is that mobility is more costly for low-skill workers. This chapter proposes and tests an alternative explanation, which is that the incidence of adverse shocks is borne in large part by (falling) real estate rental prices and (rising) social transfers. These factors reduce the real cost of living differentially for low-income workers and thus compensate them, in part or in full, for declining labor demand. I develop a spatial equilibrium model which, appropriately parameterized, identifies both the magnitude of unobserved mobility costs by skill and the shape of the local housing supply curve. Nonlinear reduced form estimates using U.S. Census data document that positive labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, that this asymmetry is larger for lows kill workers, and that such an asymmetry is absent for wages, housing values, and rental prices. Estimates of the full model using a nonlinear, simultaneous equations GMM estimator suggest that (1) the asymmetric population response is primarily accounted for by an asymmetric housing supply curve, (2) the differential migration response by skill is primarily accounted for by transfer payments, and (3) estimated mobility costs are at most modest and are comparable for high-skill and low-skill workers, suggesting that the primary explanation for the comparative immobility of low-skilled workers is not higher mobility costs per se, but rather a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks. The second chapter, written jointly with Daron Acemoglu and Amy Finkelstein, studies how local area health spending responds to permanent changes in local area income. This chapter is motivated by the fact that health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century, and a common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. This strategy enables us to capture both the partial equilibrium and the local general equilibrium effects of an increase in income on health expenditures. Our central estimate is an income elasticity of 0.7, with an elasticity of 1.1 as the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval. Point estimates from alternative specifications fall on both sides of our central estimate, but are almost always less than 1. We also present evidence suggesting that there are unlikely to be substantial national or global general equilibrium effects of rising income on health spending, for example through induced innovation. Our overall reading of the evidence is that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health share of GDP. The third chapter, written jointly with Kory Kroft, studies theoretically and empirically how optimal Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits vary with local labor market conditions. Theoretically, we derive the relationship between the moral hazard cost of UI and the unemployment rate in a standard search model. The model motivates our empirical strategy which tests whether the effect of UI benefits on unemployment durations varies with the local unemployment rate. In our preferred specification, a one standard deviation increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the magnitude of the duration elasticity by 32%. Using this estimate to calibrate the optimal level of UI benefits, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 6.4 percentage point increase in the optimal replacement rate. JEL classification: J61, 110, J65.