Li, Lixing, and Wu, Xiaoyu—Housing price and entrepreneurship in China Housing price has increased dramatically in China during the past decade. The appreciation of house value could relax credit constraint and thus encourage entrepreneurship. However, a house serves as both an important investment channel and a prerequisite for marriage in China. The continuous high return of investment in hou...

During the last decades households in the U.S. have experienced that residential house prices move in a persistent manner, i.e. that returns are positively serially correlated. Since an owner-occupied home is usually the largest investment of a household it is important to understand how households act when they base their consumption and investment decisions on this experience. We show in a se...

R esidential investment is one of the most volatile components of GDP. Coming out of a recession, it is not uncommon for residential investment to jump by more than 20 percent in a year. Going into a recession, it may fall by a similar fraction. Thus, while residential investment accounts for just 4 percent of GDP, it can have a disproportionate influence at critical junctures. Fluctuations in ...

The specific conditions that characterize housing finance contracts allow me to determine a precise relationship between financial constraints and the income sensitivity of investment demand: relaxation of financial constraints is associated with higher income sensitivity of housing investment demand (and equilibrium housing prices). This implication differs from those explored in previous rese...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

I construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in this paper to study the fluctuations in the U.S. housing markets. The model features a market for newly built houses, a secondary market for old houses, and an endogenous term structure of nominal interest rates. Negative technological progress in the housing sector explains the upward trend in house prices over the past four ...

We design an infrastructure experiment in Mexico to evaluate the impact of street pavement on residential property values and private residential investment. We find that the provision of street pavement increases housing values by 21-25% according to homeowners, and 14-15% according to professional appraisals. Private investment responded too: Households on paved streets invest more in housing...

There appears to be a current policy fascination with what rental provision from the private housing sector could offer to the UK’s housing market and to national and local economies. A plethora of reports from Parliamentary Committees, independent think-tanks, academic and professional bodies have promoted the benefits of new private rental supplies, but there seems little critical evaluation ...

This paper quantitatively investigates the optimal capital income taxation in the general equilibrium overlapping generations model, which incorporates characteristics of housing and the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-occupied housing. Housing tax policy is found to have a substantial effect on how capital income should be taxed. Given the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-oc...