BACKGROUND Recent research by demographers and economists has examined the link between living costs and fertility outcomes. The literature has provided some evidence that high rents, or high housing costs, discourage fertility. OBJECTIVE I re-examine the hypothesis that delayed fertility (age at first birth) is related to the costs of housing measured either as rents or sales prices. METHO...

Housing affordability problems have become more serious over the course of the last few decades and are now also affecting the middle-class, despite the fall in prices on the housing market. This study proposes a methodology to assess threshold-income as an index for measuring housing affordability by applying a combination of the ratio income and residual income approaches. The methodology is ...

A central purpose of this chapter is to assess whether the available empirical evidence supports the view that current levels of housing discrimination are a significant contributor to residential segregation in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. Through the course of this chapter, the reader will find that the empirical patterns of racial segregation in the U.S. are often inconsistent the ava...

We formulate and estimate an equilibrium model of metropolitan housing markets with housing differentiated by quality. Quality is a latent variable that captures all features of a dwelling and its environment. Two applications illustrate the value of our new technique. First, we develop a semi-parametric approach to estimate the model for Chicago and New York, obtaining housing prices for each ...

This paper investigates the relationship between metropolitan area growth, inequality, and segregation by income across neighborhoods. I propose a simple model based on the notion that rising income inequality creates housing market pressure leading to residential segregation by income. However, because different income groups live in different types of houses, the housing stock must change if ...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale much smaller than the census tract (a representative sample of households or ‘kernels’ and their ten ...

The variation in default rates by region is quite substantial. Default rates in the Northcentral states were about five times as large as default rates in the Southeastern states. These differences reflect the credit rate risk associated with the real estate markets in each of the regions, the fortunes of the regional economies, and the loan-tovalue ratios and ages of the mortgages.” Quigley an...

across metropolitan areas in their changing levels of housing discrimination, with the aim of exploring whether they are “causally” related to corresponding variations in fair housing enforcement activities during the 1990s, controlling for other factors. The specific research questions include: How do changes in the 1989–2000 incidence of racial/ethnic discriminatory behaviors of various sorts...

We present the first nationwide index of directly-measured land values by metropolitan area and investigate their relationship with housing prices. Construction prices and geographic and regulatory constraints are shown to increase the cost of housing relative to land. On average, approximately one-third of housing costs are due to land, with an increasing share in higher-value areas, implying ...