The Unassuming Economist

On cross-country:

• Asset Bubbles and Global Imbalances – Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

On the US:

• Dominating Firms Can Depress House Prices as Well as Wages – Wall Street Journal
• Experts predict what the 2020 housing market will bring – Washington Post
• Trump Administration Plans Roll Back of Low-Income Housing Rules – Wall Street Journal
• Our cities don’t have enough affordable housing. Changing this policy will help – CNN
• New Trump Administration Regulations Say That Affordable Housing Is Fair Housing – Reason
• AEI Housing Market Indicators release on September 2019 data – American Enterprise Institute
• Pricey California Targeted in New Effort for Housing Density – Bloomberg
• Home Purchase Sentiment Index Caps Off Strong 2019 Near Its Survey High – Fannie Mae
• How Wealthy Towns Keep People With Housing Vouchers Out – ProPublica
• Opinion: Unintended consequences: How ‘green’ regulations exacerbate the housing crisis – Market Watch
• As Trump Ditches a Fair Housing Rule, New York City Doubles Down – Citylab
• California Governor Pushes $1.4 Billion Plan To Tackle Homelessness – NPR
• Why The Most Favorable Markets for Tech Expansion Aren’t Where You Might Think – Zillow

On other countries:

• [Brazil] Brazil’s house prices keep falling – Global Property Guide
• [Canada] Canada’s house price boom takes off – Global Property Guide
• [United Kingdom] London house prices link to earnings is ‘almost entirely dislocated’ – Financial Times
• [United Kingdom] UK house price affordability worsens over past decade – Financial Times

Below is a preliminary list of papers that will presented at this year’s AEA Annual Meeting on January 3-5 in San Diego, California.

On housing and cycles

• Housing Cycles and Exchange Rates – Paper
• Is the Behavior of Sellers with Expected Gains and Losses Relevant to Cycles in House Prices? – Paper
• China’s Housing Bubble, Infrastructure Investment, and Economic Growth – Paper and Presentation
• Black-Cat Markets and the Value of Superstition: Evidence from Housing Prices in China – AEA
• Regional housing market risk – AEA
• ‘Memory’ in the Middle: Housing Price – Macroeconomic Interactions in the United States – Paper
• The Impact of Parental Wealth on College Enrollment & Degree Attainment: Evidence from the Housing Boom & Bust – AEA
• Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the United States Housing Boom – Paper
• Property Tax Limits and Female Labor Supply: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Bust – AEA
• Local House Price Comovements – Paper
• How Auctions Amplify House-Price Fluctuations – Paper
• Unemployment and the United States Housing Market during the Great Recession – AEA

On housing and credit

• Mortgage Credit and Housing Markets – Paper
• Mortgage Debt, Consumption, and Illiquid Housing Markets in the Great Recession – Paper
• The Geography of Mortgage Lending in Times of FinTech – Paper
• Credit Surface of Mortgage Loans: Lenders’ Belief of Housing Markets – AEA
• Concentration and Lending in Mortgage Markets – AEA
• Policy Uncertainty and Bank Mortgage Credit – Paper and Presentation

On housing policy

• The Macroprudential Toolkit: Effectiveness and Interactions – Paper
• Aggregate and Distributional Impacts of Housing Policy: China’s Experiment – Paper
• Unintended Consequences of LTV Limits on Credit and Housing Choices – Paper
• Sticky Expectations in the Housing Market: Evidence from the Housing Purchase Restriction Policy – AEA
• Harping on about HARP: Consequences of Ineligibility for the Home Affordable Refinance Program – Paper
• The Anatomy of the Transmission of Macroprudential Policies – Paper
• Comparing the PRA Program to Other Housing Options for People with Disabilities – AEA
• Targeting In-Kind Transfers through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation – AEA
• Bank Capital Requirements and Asset Prices: Evidence from the Swiss Real Estate Market – Paper

On housing affordability

• (Why) Are Housing Costs Rising? – Paper
• Affordable Housing and City Welfare – Paper
• Do More Housing Units Reduce Nearby Rents? – AEA
• Procyclical Price-Rent Ratios: Theory and Implications – Paper
• Religion, Ideology, and Housing Affordability: Israeli Settlement of the West Bank – Paper
• Highly Disaggregated Land Unavailability – Paper

On housing and evictions

• Does Eviction Have Spillovers on Children? – AEA
• Housing Insecurity, Homelessness and Populism: Evidence from the UK – Paper
• Measuring Housing Stability with Consumer Reference Data – AEA

On housing, investors, and speculation

• Investors and Housing Affordability – Paper
• Fundamental and Speculative Demands for Housing – AEA
• S. Housing as Global Safe Haven Asset: Evidence from China Shocks – Paper
• Capital Flows, Asset Prices, and the Real Economy: A “China Shock” in the US Real Estate Market – AEA
• Capital Flows, Real Estate, and City Business Cycles: Micro Evidence from the German Boom – AEA

On housing and the sharing economy

• Does bike sharing increase house prices? Evidence from micro-level data in Shanghai – Paper and Presentation
• The Last Mile Matters: Impact of Dockless Bike Sharing on Subway Housing Price Premium – Paper
• Airbnb and Private Investment in Chicago Neighborhoods – Paper

On housing, the environment, and natural disasters

• Perception Versus Reality: The Noise Complaint Effect on Home Values – Paper
• How Much Does Nearby Blight Affect Real Estate Prices? The Case of Hurricane Sandy – Paper
• Dust Storms, Migration and Housing Markets – AEA

On housing and migration

• A Tale of Two Cities: The Impact of Cross-Border Migration on Hong Kong’s Housing Market – Paper and Presentation
• A World Divided: Refugee Centers, House Prices, and Household Preferences – Paper and Presentation
• The Real Estate Consequences of Immigration Shocks: Evidence from the United States’ Mexican Repatriation – AEA
• Residential Segregation and Ethnicity – AEA
• Immigration and Housing Rents: The 2015 Refugee Crisis in Germany – AEA

On housing and everything else

• The Role of Agents in Tax Evasion: Evidence from the Housing Market in China – Paper
• Inside Job: Evidence from the Chinese Housing Market – Paper
• On the Differential Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the Housing Market: Blue versus Red – Paper and Presentation
• Shifting House Price Gradients: Evidence Using Both Rental and Asset Prices – Paper
• Local Constant-Quality Housing Market Liquidity Indices – Paper
• Do Elderly Individuals Delay Claiming Social Security and Cash-out Home Equity When House Prices Appreciate? – Paper
• Street Name Fluency and Housing Prices – Paper and Presentation
• Picture and Playground: Valuing Coastal Amenities – Paper
• Endowments and Minority Homeownership – Paper
• Heterogeneous Households and Market Segmentation in a Hedonic Framework – Paper and Presentation
• Housing Search Frictions: Evidence from Detailed Search Data and a Field Experiment – AEA
• Housing Wealth, Bequests, and the Elderly – Paper
• Public Transport, Noise Complaints, and Housing: Evidence from Sentiment Analysis in Singapore – Paper and Presentation
• The Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Thin Markets, House Price Seasonality, and the December Discount – Paper
• Do School Shootings Erode Property Values? – Paper
• Collateral Value and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Property Tax Reform – Paper
• Tracing the Source of Liquidity for Distressed Housing Markets – Paper
• Neighborhood housing rent index construction and spatial discontinuity: a machine learning approach – Paper
• A Tale of Two Cities: The Impact of Cross-Border Migration on Hong Kong’s Housing Market – Paper and Presentation

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

Interesting paper by Chris Papageorgiou , Fidel Perez-Sebastian and Nikola Spatafora:

“We explore the contribution of product-quality upgrading to the export performance of six fast-growing Asian economies: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand. We focus on measuring the impact of quality upgrading on the changes in these countries’ sectoral export shares during 1970–2010. We build a multisector Ricardian trade model which allows for changes in product quality, and calibrate it to generate predictions about export volumes. Unlike previous literature, our approach allows estimation without employing domestic production data. Our results point to quality upgrading being a key driver of export shares.”

From a new working paper by Zoe Cullen (Harvard University) and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA):

“The old boys’ club refers to the alleged advantage that male employees have over their female counterparts in interacting with powerful men. For example, male employees may schmooze with their managers in ways that female employees cannot. We study this phenomenon using data from a large financial institution. We use an event study analysis of manager rotation to estimate the causal effect of managers’ gender on their employees’ career progression. We find that when male employees are assigned to male managers, they are promoted faster in the following years than they would have been if they were assigned to female managers. Female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager’s gender. These differences in career progression cannot be explained by differences in effort or output. This male-to-male advantage can explain a third of the gender gap in promotions. Moreover, we provide suggestive evidence that these manager effects are due to socialization between male employees and male managers. We show that these manager effects are present only if the employee works in close proximity to the manager. We use survey data to show that, after transitioning to a male manager, male employees spend more time with their managers. Finally, we study a shock to socialization within males, based on the anecdotal evidence that employees who smoke tend to spend more time together. We find that when male employees who smoke switch to male managers who smoke, they spend more of their breaks with their managers and are promoted faster in the following years. Moreover, the effects of these smoking manager switches are similar in timing and magnitude to the effects of the gender manager switches.”

On cross-country:

• Q3 2019: The global house price boom continues strong, especially in Europe, but sharp slowdown in North America, the Middle East and some parts of Asia-Pacific – Global Property Guide
• Prime Global Cities Index Q3 2019 – Knight Frank

On the US:

• Bold Predictions for 2020: Shrinking Homes and a More Stable Market – Zillow
• These Housing Markets Could Heat Up (Podcast) – Bloomberg
• Fix California’s Housing Crisis, Activists Say. But Which One? – Citylab
• A Modest Proposal: How Even Minimal Densification Could Yield Millions of New Homes – Zillow
• Mapping America’s Metropolitan Growth: Islands of Density in a Sea of No Growth – Zillow
• Home Purchase Sentiment Rebounds in November, Re-Approaches Survey High – FannieMae
• Home Equity in Retirement – Philadelphia Fed
• Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance – Philadelphia Fed
• Opinion: To solve the problem of unaffordable entry-level housing, abolish single-family zoning – MarketWatch
• Vouchers can help the poor find homes. But landlords often won’t accept them. – VOX
• Fannie and Freddie Need Fixing — Urgently: A Response to Joe Nocera – Cato Liberty
• Release: New Carpenter Index developed by AEI Housing Center – American Enterprise Institute
• “Decommodifying” Housing and Other Magical Thinking – E21
• Tenants are winners in Manhattan’s oversupplied luxury home market – Financial Times

On other countries:

• [China] China’s Housing Market Goes the WeWork Way—and Thousands Get Evicted – Wall Street Journal
• [Israel] Does Location Matter? Evidence on Differential Mortgage Pricing in Israel – Bank of Israel
• [Lithuania] Lithuania’s modest house prices increase – Global Property Guide
• [Netherlands] Netherlands’ house price growth slowly decreasing – Global Property Guide
• [Norway] Norway’s financial stability as risk from household debt, property prices -regulator – Reuters

*Please note that Housing View will be on hiatus for the next three weeks.