Three Essays Investigating Post-bubble Housing Market: Prices and Foreclosures

Three Essays Investigating Post-bubble Housing Market: Prices and Foreclosures PDF Author: Xian Fang Bak
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description

Three Essays Investigating Post-bubble Housing Market: Prices and Foreclosures

Three Essays Investigating Post-bubble Housing Market: Prices and Foreclosures PDF Author: Xian Fang Bak
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Essays on the Housing Market and Home Prices

Essays on the Housing Market and Home Prices PDF Author: Calvin Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters that concern the housing market and home prices. The first chapter analyzes why foreclosures were more prevalent than short sales despite the advantages that short sales offered. The Great Recession led to widespread mortgage defaults, with borrowers resorting to both foreclosures and short sales to resolve their defaults. I first quantify the economic impact of foreclosures relative to short sales by comparing the home price implications of both. After accounting for omitted variable bias, I find that homes selling as a short sale transact at 8.5% higher prices on average than those that sell after foreclosure. Short sales also exert smaller negative externalities than foreclosures, with one short sale decreasing nearby property values by one percentage point less than a foreclosure. So why weren't short sales more prevalent? These home-price benefits did not increase the prevalence of short sales because free rents during foreclosures caused more borrowers to select foreclosures, even though higher advances led servicers to prefer more short sales. In states with longer foreclosure timelines, the benefits from foreclosures increased for borrowers, so short sales were less utilized. I find that one standard deviation increase in the average length of the foreclosure process decreased the short sale share by 0.35-0.45 standard deviation. My results suggest that policies that increase the relative attractiveness of short sales could help stabilize distressed housing markets. The second chapter analyzes how the housing market captures the efficiency of public goods. This chapter is co-authored with David Schönholzer. In the U.S., 36 million people live in unincorporated communities without separate municipal government, instead receiving limited local public goods by counties and special districts. This paper formalizes and empirically quantifies the extent of sorting induced by this arrangement of local governance. Based on predictions of a Tiebout model with heterogeneous income and preferences, we document the effect of municipal governance on housing supply, house prices, land prices, and public goods. We use a boundary discontinuity design and an event study design with administrative data from all boundary changes of 189 Californian cities, combined with the universe of individual property sales over the years 1988-2013. We find considerable sorting induced by municipal boundaries and their changes: sales prices are around $6,000 higher in municipalities and land values are 20% higher. Both housing supply and land values increase substantially after annexation. Changes in per capita expenditures and increases in the quality of police services provide suggestive evidence for public goods as the key mechanism for sorting. The third chapter analyzes the effects of real estate investments by foreign Chinese on local economies in the United States. This chapter is co-authored with Zhimin Li and Leslie Sheng Shen. Starting in 2007, the U.S. witnessed an unprecedented surge in housing purchases by foreign Chinese. We exploit cross-local-area variation in the concentration of Chinese population stemming from pre-sample period differences in Chinese population settlement to identify the economic effects of these investments. Using detailed transaction-level housing purchase data, we find housing investment by foreigners induces higher local area housing net wealth, leading to higher local employment in the non-tradable sectors. Our results suggest the improvement in household balance sheet resulting from capital inflow for housing investment in the U.S. played a mitigating role for the domestic economy during the Great Recession. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a framework that incorporates the housing net worth channel for interpreting the empirical estimates. Our evidence highlight the role of capital inflow and foreign investments on the domestic output and employment, especially in times of economic downturns.

Three Essays on the Housing Market and the Macroeconomy

Three Essays on the Housing Market and the Macroeconomy PDF Author: Stefanie J. Huber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thesis sheds light on certain macroeconomic aspects of the housing market. Chapter 1 explores a novel channel for house price bubble formation: the demand for housing consumption. I argue that the lower the demand for housing consumption, the larger the maximum bubble size, and the larger economies' vulnerability to house price bubbles. In terms of policy implications, I show that a help-to-buy scheme makes the economy more bubble-prone, while rental subsidies are an effective tool to reduce the prevalence of house price bubbles. Using a laboratory experiment, Chapter 2 supports the theoretical and empirical findings of Chapter 1. Chapter 3 investigates whether the persistent cross-country differences in homeownership rates are driven by cultural tastes. Analyzing the homeownership attitudes of second-generation immigrants in the United States leads to robust evidence for this hypothesis.

Three Essays on Housing and Labor Economics

Three Essays on Housing and Labor Economics PDF Author: XUE HU
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
These essays contribute towards our understanding of housing and labor economics. This dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of negative housing equity on households' geo- graphical mobility using data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The empirical analysis implies that addressing the endogeneity nature of homeowners' underwater mortgage status is crucial. Even with comprehensive controls for households' demographic characteristics and macro-level factors, omitted variable bias such as homeowners' attitudes towards their financial responsibility may still generate estimation bias that is quite large. After proper instrumenting for homeowners' underwater mortgage status using local shocks from housing and labor markets, the estimation results show that having underwater mortgages is associated with an average decline in mobility rate of about 17 percentage points. The second chapter investigates the role of housing choice and mortgage on employment transitions when there are uncertainties regarding income and house prices. Motivated by the empirical evidence on large employment-transition disparities between homeowners and renters, I develop and estimate a structural model in which mortgage obligations motivate homeowners to exert greater job-search efforts during unemployment spells. The model is used to understand individuals' response to housing and labor market shocks. I find that while the decline in house prices creates negative labor market externalities for renters, tightening mortgage constraints result in greater job search incentives for homeowners. With concurrent negative labor market shocks, the probability of transitioning out of unemployment for both renters and homeowners declines. Two policy experiments are conducted. The first shows that lower refinance cost discourages housing equity accumulation and is associated with a decline in the average employment rate. The second demonstrates that a lower down payment requirement encourages the transition into home ownership, which has positive labor market implications, especially for younger individuals. The first two chapters explore the relation between underwater mortgage and geographical mobility and impacts of mortgage debt obligation on employment incentives. Both analyses are based on individual-level data. The last chapter investigates the mysteries of regional housing market disparities from a macro perspective. This chapter shows that local economic conditions are correlated with deviations between house prices and rents in a price-rent model framework, suggesting that the demand for credit and housing is greater when a variety of local economic conditions are more supportive. Several different measures of local economic conditions are considered in this chapter: local unemployment rates, local unemployment rates relative to the natural rate of unemployment, local inflation rates, and measures of local perceptions of the cost of credit. This chapter attempts to offer explanations not as how or why house prices increased, but rather, given the myriad of national factors making home purchase easier and cheaper, where house prices increased. This approach also resolves a bit of a puzzle as to why the housing bubble was so pronounced in some areas and not others.

Essays on Housing Prices

Essays on Housing Prices PDF Author: Yifan Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation examines the dynamics between housing prices, firms, and households. The first chapter focuses on sequential information revelation in the housing markets; the second chapter investigates the impact of house price appreciation on the returns of value versus growth firms; the third chapter estimates the effect of gun control on home values. In Chapter 1, I use Amazon's progressive revelation of its new headquarters locations in Virginia and New York to demonstrate that the housing market fully incorporates information about future demand well before disclosure. Spatial difference-in-differences analysis shows that housing prices near the Virginia headquarters exhibit 4.9% premia before Amazon's headquarters decision but no additional increase upon decision. Price premia for New York reach 17.5% before the decision but disappear once Amazon cancels the headquarters. Other finalist cities exhibit no price premia, precluding the possibility of speculation. Overall, this study suggests that the housing market can quickly incorporate private information about future demand shocks. In Chapter 2, I investigate the value-growth premium puzzle by merging insights from urban economics and finance that relate firm location to its stock performance. The value-growth premium in locations with high historical house price appreciation is 3.6% per year larger than the premium in areas that experienced little house price appreciation. The results support investment-based models explaining the value premium; moreover I find the house price channel reduces returns of growth firms rather than increasing returns of value firms. House price appreciation remains significant after controlling for common explanations of the premium. In Chapter 3, using cross-border variation in the timing of state gun control law passage dates, I find that the introduction of universal background checks for gun sales results in a roughly 2.3 percent decline in housing prices on average. I find a more significant decrease in housing prices, i.e., up to 5.3 percent, if the state is neighboring a Republican rather than a Democratic state. This result is robust to several specification tests and does not appear to be associated with neighborhood crime rate changes.

Three Essays on the Housing and Mortgage Markets

Three Essays on the Housing and Mortgage Markets PDF Author: Yuan Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Three Essays Exploring the Impact of Higher Energy Prices on Housing Markets

Three Essays Exploring the Impact of Higher Energy Prices on Housing Markets PDF Author: Steven Rubenstein Kursh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description


Essays on Housing and Public Economics

Essays on Housing and Public Economics PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The following essays examine households decisions related to public policy in the housing market. Chapter 1 evaluates the Homeowner Affordability Modification Program by modeling and structurally estimating the mortgage default decision and then investigating household responsiveness to default relative to mortgage value. Chapter 2 studies the consumer response to the First-time Homebuyer Tax Credit using a difference-in-difference approach comparing the demand response of eligible household to ineligible households. Chapter 3 investigates mortgage foreclosures related to financial incentives of the foreclosure process by comparing variation across states in the length of the foreclosure process and the requirement for judicial review of foreclosure using a regression discontinuity across state borders.

Three Essays in Housing Economics

Three Essays in Housing Economics PDF Author: Hanfu Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Get Book Here

Book Description
The result is consistent with the intuition that people tend to have a higher stress level due to the loss of home equity and this loss of home equity also increases the possibility of foreclosure, which is occurring in states with large house price declines, and thus increases homeowners' debt stress.

State of the Housing Market

State of the Housing Market PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreclosure
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description