Wage Flexibility and Employment Fluctuations: Evidence from the Housing Sector* Many economists suspect that downward nominal wage rigidities in ongoing labor contracts are an important source of employment fluctuations over the business cycle but there is little direct empirical evidence on this conjecture. This paper compares three occupations in the housing sector with very different wage se...

A model in which homebuyers make a modest approximation leads house prices to display three features present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at five-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals. Valuing a house involves forecasting the current and future demand to live in the surrounding a...

Major deviation Participation in housing-delivery strategies is a major deviation from the cornerstone of modernist theories and practices in architecture. In Kenya, modern development models adopted in housing delivery have proved inadequate to meeting the demand for urban housing. This shortfall has been reflected both in the quality and in the number of available houses. It has led to the pr...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate the relation between housing, socioeconomic status, and self reported general and mental health. This study is an empirical investigation of social and economic dimensions of housing, specifically, demand, control, and material (affordability, dwelling type) and meaningful (pride in dwelling, home as a refuge) dimensions of everyday life as they occur in the domes...

Why are regional unemployment differentials in Europe so persistent if, as the wage curve literature demonstrates, there is no compensation in labour markets? We hypothesize that workers in high-unemployment regions are compensated in housing markets. Modelling regional unemployment differentials as a consequence of centralized wage bargaining, we show that clearing of land markets may undo the...

State-sponsored enterprise zones are a major economic development tool for over forty states. In many cases, the impact of these geographically targeted tax-based policies has never been evaluated. One roadblock to evaluation is the difficulty of controlling for the persistent effect of distressed local economic conditions while searching for possible programmatic effects. We examine the impact...