Urban economists understand housing prices with a spatial equilibrium approach that assumes people must be indifferent across locations. Since the spatial no arbitrage condition is inherently imprecise, other economists have turned to different no arbitrage conditions, such as the prediction that individuals must be indifferent between owning and renting. This paper argues the predictions from ...

How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of 19th century London in which one in seven families experienced the death of a potential wage earner. Ten years after the epidemic, housing prices are significantly lower just inside the catchme...

Home prices have surged in major Chinese cities, leading to concerns of asset price bubbles and housing affordability. The policy of home purchase restrictions (HPR) has been one of China’s harshest housing market interventions to squeeze out speculative demand and dampen the soaring home prices. Beijing was the first city to implement the HPR. Employing the regression discontinuity design tech...

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Studies of real estate markets have long been hamstrung by the lack of reliable information on the flow price of housing. In contrast to the voluminous information on constant-quality real estate sale prices (from e.g. the Federal Housing Finance Administration) comparable indices for rents have not been available. The only widely available data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), ...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of these studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to rental housing services, which display less quality progress. However, as German households spend about...

The US Government collects numerous statistics related to housing within the United States. One of these data sets, the American Housing Survey (AHS), provides a very rich source of information. However, exploring complex timeseries data can present many problems. AHSExplorer is an application developed to explore the information within this data set. In particular, AHSExplorer provides a means...

Infomaster is a virtual information system that allows users to access a variety of heterogeneous, distributed information from multiple perspectives. Infomaster accesses information stored in databases or knowledge bases using Agent Communication Language (ACL), a combination of KQML, KIF, and Ontologies. Facilitators are used decompose, route, and translate requests and assemble, route, and t...

Electronic intermediaries have become pervasive in sales transactions for many durables, such as cars, power tools, and apartments. Yet only recently have they successfully tackled the challenge of enabling parties to share such goods. A key impediment to sharing is a lender’s concern about damage due to unobservable actions by a renter, usually resulting in moral hazard. This paper shows how a...

The paper studies the impact of the portfolio constraint imposed by the consumption demand for housing (the “housing constraint”) on the household’s optimal holdings of financial assets. Since the ratio of housing to net worth declines as the household accumulates wealth, the housing constraint induces a life-cycle pattern in the portfolio shares of stocks and bonds. For reasonable degrees of r...