The Unassuming Economist

Below is a preliminary list of papers that will presented at this year’s AEA Annual Meeting on January 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia.

On housing and cycles

• Is Housing the Business Cycle? A Multi-resolution Analysis for OECD Countries – Paper
• The First Housing Bubble? Prices and Turnover in Amsterdam, 1582-1810 – Paper
• Residential Investment and Recession Predictability – Paper
• Residential House Prices, Commercial Real Estate and Bank Failures – Paper and Presentation
• Perception of House Price Risk and Homeownership – Paper
• The Effects of Local Risk on Homeownership – Paper and Presentation
• What Drove the 2003-2006 House Price Boom and Subsequent Collapse? Disentangling Competing Explanations – Paper
• Expectations During the U.S. Housing Boom: Inferring Beliefs from Actions – Paper
• The Housing Boom and Bust: Model Meets Evidence – AEA
• Spatial Estimates of Bubbles: Tokyo House Prices and Rents – AEA

On housing and mortgage

• Brokerage Choice, Dual Agency and Housing Market Strength – Paper
• Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the U.S. Housing Boom – Paper
• Financial Fragility with SAM? – Paper
• Structuring Mortgages for Macroeconomic Stability – Paper
• A Crisis of Missed Opportunities? Foreclosure Costs and Mortgage Modification During the Great Recession – Paper
• Mortgage Design and Slow Recoveries: The Role of Recourse and Default – Paper
• Correlation in Mortgage Defaults – Paper
• State Dependency and the Efficacy of Monetary Policy: The Refinancing Channel – Paper
• No Job, No Money, No Refi: Frictions to Refinancing in a Recession – Paper
• Mortgage Losses: Loss on Sale and Holding Costs – Paper and Presentation
• Can Lending Restrictions on “Exotic” Lending Dampen Housing Price Volatility? A Panel VAR Exploration – AEA
• Mortgage Design and Housing Market – AEA
• House Price Markups and Mortgage Defaults – AEA
• Will Housing Mortgagors Increase Their Consumptions after Paying off Loans?-Evidence from Urban China – AEA
• Home Equity Withdrawal via Credit Card Borrowing-Micro Evidence from China – AEA
• Rental Markets and the Effect of Credit Conditions on House Prices – Paper
• Mortgage Lending: Evidence from a Correspondence Field Experiment – AEA
• Fueling the Credit Crisis – AEA
• Strategic or Illiquid Mortgage Default? Evidence from Household Bank Account Data– AEA
• The Impact of Liquidity Regulation on Bank Mortgage Lending – AEA
• How Is Financial Literacy Important in Mortgage Market? Different Evidence from Urban China – AEA
• The Impact of Repossession Risk on Mortgage Default – AEA
• Mortgage Prepayment and Path-Dependent Effects of Monetary Policy – AEA
• Mortgage Finance Development Across the World – AEA

On housing policy

• Mortgage Debt, Hand-to-Mouth Households, and the Monetary Policy Transmission – Presentation
• Heterogeneous Spillovers Of Housing Credit Policy – Paper
• The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco – Paper
• The Effect of Tax Reform on Tax Liabilities of Owners and Renters – Paper
• Intermediated Credit Supply and Endogenous Household Leverage Constraints – Paper
• Real Estate Asset Bubbles and Monetary Policy: The Channel between Central Bank’s Balance Sheet and Firms’ Balance Sheets – Paper
• Tax Reform, Homeownership Costs, and House Prices – Paper
• The Effect of Government Mortgage Guarantees on Homeownership – Paper
• Loan to Value Limits and House Prices – AEA
• Empirics on the Causal Effects of Rent Control in Germany – AEA
• An Urban Equilibrium Model with Rent Controls Applied to Paris Urban Area – AEA
• Monetary Policy, Heterogeneity, and the Housing Channel – AEA
• Can Lending Restrictions on “Exotic” Lending Dampen Housing Price Volatility? A Panel VAR Exploration – AEA
• Mortgage Pricing and Monetary Policy – AEA

On housing supply

• Fewer players, fewer homes: concentration and the new dynamics of housing supply – Paper and Presentation
• What’s Lost in the Aggregate: Lessons from a Local Index of Housing Supply Elasticities – Paper
• New Construction and Mortgage Default – Paper and Presentation
• Spatial Misallocation in Chinese Housing and Land Markets – AEA

On housing affordability

• Targeting In-Kind Transfers Through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation – Paper
• Affordable Housing and City Welfare – Paper
• Political Control of the State Legislature and Municipal Bond Financing for Affordable Housing – Paper
• Waiting Lists, Lotteries and Public Housing: Natural Experiment Evidence from Amsterdam – Paper
• Affordable Housing in Westchester County – Paper
• How (Not) to Allocate Affordable Housing – AEA
• The Public-Housing Allocation Problem: Theory and Evidence from Pittsburgh – AEA
• Not In My Neighbor’s Back Yard? Laneway Homes and Neighbors’ Property Values – AEA
• Does Affordable Housing Participation Reduce Default and Prepayment? The Case for the Montgomery County MPDU Program – AEA

On housing and evictions

• Does Eviction Cause Poverty? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Cook County, IL – Paper
• The Effect of Residential Evictions on Low-Income Adults – AEA
• Health Insurance and Housing Stability: The Effect of Medicaid Expansion on Evictions – AEA

On housing, investors, and speculation

• Out-of-Town Home Buyers and City Welfare – Paper
• Economic Consequences of Housing Speculation – Paper
• Speculative Dynamics of Prices and Volume – Paper
• Expectations During the U.S. Housing Boom: Inferring Beliefs from Actions – Paper
• Speculative Asset Bubbles: The Primary Drivers of “Systemic” Banking Crises in Post-war Advanced Economies – Presentation
• Buying Up Elm Street: Institutional Investors and the Housing Recovery – AEA
• Speculating on Superstition: Evidence from Housing Transactions in Hungry Ghost Months in Singapore – AEA

On housing and the sharing economy

• Which Neighborhood Joins the Sharing Economy and Why? – The Case of the Short-term Rental Market in New York City – Paper
• Cash to Spend: Credit Constraints, IPO Lockups, and House Prices – Paper
• Can Landlords be Paid to Stop Avoiding Voucher Tenants? – Paper

On housing, the environment, and natural disasters

• Toxic Assets: How the Housing Market Responds to Environmental Information Shocks – Paper
• Aircraft Noise Pollution, Soundproofing, and Lagging House Price Adjustments: Evidence from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport – Paper
• Natural Disasters and Housing Markets: The Tenure Choice Channel – Paper

On housing and transportation

• Commuting, Labor and Housing Market Effects of Mass Transportation: Welfare and Identification – Paper and Presentation
• International Travel Costs and Local Housing Markets – Paper

On housing and everything else

• Getting High or Getting Low? – Paper
• Allocation of Education, School District Policy and Housing Market Efficiency – Presentation
• Why Are Housing Demand Curves Upward Sloping? – Paper and Presentation
• The Cross-Section of Expected Housing Returns – Paper
• Amenity Migration within a Millennial City Evidence from Washington DC Tax Data, 2005-2014 – Paper and Presentation
• Getting More by Asking for Less? – Paper
• Magnification of the ‘China Shock’ Through the United States Housing Market – Paper and Presentation
• Valuing Housing Services in the Era of Big Data: A User Cost Approach Leveraging Zillow Microdata – Paper
• The Propagation of Regional Shocks in Housing Markets: Evidence from Oil Price Shocks in Canada – Paper
• Housing Wealth, Health and Deaths of Despair – Paper
• What Happens After You Overpay for Your House – Paper and Presentation
• When Birth or Death Hits Home: House Prices, Rents and Demography in Paris and Amsterdam, 1400-present – Presentation
• Residential House Prices, Commercial Real Estate and Bank Failures – Paper and Presentation
• Perception of House Price Risk and Homeownership – Paper
• Attitudes Toward and Perceptions of the Ambiguity of House and Stock Prices – Paper
• Housing Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Household-Level Panel Data – AEA
• Sorting or Steering: Experimental Evidence on the Economic Effects of Housing Discrimination and Its Consequences for Environmental Justice – AEA
• Real Estate News and REIT Returns – AEA
• The Impact of Housing Quality on Health and Labor Market Outcomes: The German Reunification – AEA
• Sexual Orientation, Gender, Pregnancy, and Family Composition Discrimination in Machine Learning, Building Vintage and Property Values – AEA
• The Impacts of Racial Discrimination on Housing Choice and Welfare in the United States – AEA
• House Prices, Migration, and the Evolution of the Wealth Distribution – AEA

*AEA indicates that neither the paper or presentation is available at the moment.

**This post has been updated on January 5 to add missing papers, and to add links to presentations and papers to existing papers. 

From Finance & Development:

“Al Capone had a problem: he needed a way to disguise the enormous amounts of cash generated by his criminal empire as legitimate income. His solution was to buy all-cash laundromats, mix dirty money in with clean, and then claim that washing ordinary Americans’ shirts and socks, rather than gambling and bootlegging, was the source of his riches.

Almost a century later, the basic concept of money laundering is the same, but its scale and complexity have grown considerably. Were Capone alive today, he would have to run his washers and dryers around the clock to keep pace with demand; the United Nations recently estimated that the criminal proceeds laundered annually amount to between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP, or $1.6 to $4 trillion a year.

Threat to stability

Money laundering is what enables criminals to reap the benefits of their crimes, including corruption, tax evasion, theft, drug trafficking, and migrant smuggling. Many of these crimes pose a direct threat to economic stability. Corruption and tax evasion make it difficult for governments to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth by diminishing the resources available for productive purposes, such as building roads, schools, and hospitals. Criminal activity undermines state authority and the rule of law while squeezing out legitimate economic activity. And money laundering may create asset bubbles in markets like real estate, a common vehicle.

A recent example illustrates the point. A Guinean minister helped a foreign company obtain important mining concessions in exchange for $8.5 million in bribes. Falsely reporting that money as income from consulting work and private land sales, the minister transferred it to the United States and bought a luxury estate in New York. But his effort to turn ill-gotten gains into a seemingly legitimate asset was ultimately unsuccessful; last year, he was convicted of money laundering.

In some ways, expensive homes are the modern mobster’s collection of laundromats. A public advisory issued by US authorities last year indicated that over 30 percent of high-value, all-cash real estate purchases in New York City and several other major metropolitan areas were conducted by individuals already suspected of involvement in questionable dealings. The governments of Australia, Austria, Canada, and other countries have concluded that their own real estate markets could also be used to invest and launder dirty money.

Terrorism financing

More worrying still, dirty money—along with clean—may be a source of funding for terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist groups need money, lots of it, to compensate fighters and their families; buy weapons, food, and fuel; and bribe crooked officials. Similarly, proliferation does not come cheap. For example, North Korea has reportedly devoted a substantial portion of its scarce resources to developing nuclear weapons.”

Continue reading here.

 

Rhoda Weeks-Brown

The IMF’s latest report on Bolivia says:

“Credit quotas should be relaxed to limit poor-quality credit growth. Interest caps should also be removed so that lending decisions better reflect intrinsic risks. This would remove distortions in the allocation of credit and support desirable allocation of resources in support of growth. ASFI is urged to monitor closely capital quality for its ability to absorb potential shocks and to scrutinize possible risks arising from rapid credit growth to housing. In this context, the Fund welcomes the opportunity to assist the authorities to prepare a real estate price index and urges rapid progress.”

 

As 2018 draws to a close, below is our list of the top ten blogs of the year.

1. RIP Herman Stekler, A Forecasting Giant
2. RIP Deena Khatkhate, far-sighted IMF and RBI economist
3. How Well Do Economists Forecast Recessions? A Groundhog Day Update
4. Economic Growth from Octavian to Obama
5. Affordable Housing: Views from Albert Saiz
6. The Distribution of Gains from Globalization
7. Housing View – January 5, 2018 [2018 AEA Annual Meeting Special Edition]
8. Household Credit, Global Financial Cycle, and Macroprudential Policies: Credit Register Evidence from an Emerging Country
9. Understanding Singapore’s Housing Market
10. Growth and well-being: policy should not be based on GDP alone

Photo by Colton Duke

From Economic Policy Institute:

“Twelve charts that show how policy could reduce inequality—but is making it worse instead

With the unemployment rate at 4 percent or below for eight consecutive months, 2018 appears to be the year when the economy finally became healthy again. But while low unemployment is good news, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how typical families are faring in the current economy.

As the economy normalizes following a long, slow recovery from the Great Recession, we are quickly resuming our prerecession course of rising inequality. The fruits of economic growth are bypassing typical families and going straight into the hands of the already-rich.

Our current policy trajectory is doing nothing to reverse the trend of inequality. But it’s doing plenty to widen it. This year’s edition of Top Charts highlights how policy choices continue to exacerbate inequality and how we can achieve more broadly shared prosperity through better policy choices.

 

Continue reading here.