Transportation, Sorting and House Values

In this paper, we examine the importance of accessibility to employment and transportation system attributes for residential location choice, car ownership and house values. Using the 1980 Census of Housing and Journey to Work data merged with transportation system data, we find strong evidence of residential sorting based on employment location. We find that suburban areas with good commuter rail access to the CBD have significantly greater fractions of their labor force working in the CBD, own fewer cars and have higher house prices than similar neighborhoods and houses in census tracts without service. The house value premium is over 6.4%.     

Large‐Scale Buy‐to‐Rent Investors in the Single‐Family Housing Market: The Emergence of a New Asset Class

In 2012, several large firms began purchasing single‐family homes, creating large portfolios of rental property, and securitizing these investments in capital markets. We present the first systematic evidence on this new investor activity in order to shed light on the factors that have supported its emergence. Three key factors were the ample supply of property for sale, tight mortgage financing and a decrease in acquisition and managerial costs brought about by technological advances. In addition, we show that buy‐to‐rent investors appear to have supported house prices in the neighborhoods where they concentrated.     

Immigration and Informal Labor

We develop state‐level proxies for informal employment using differences between measures of self‐reported employment and officially sanctioned employment. In construction and landscaping, industries associated with under‐the‐table labor, we develop proxies for informal work based on productivity per officially sanctioned worker. We relate each set of proxies for informal employment to changes in immigrant population and composition. We find some evidence that immigration is associated with informal employment generally and in the construction industry when prevailing wages are low. States with high concentrations of low‐skilled male immigrants have higher levels of informal employment in the landscaping industry.     

Immigration of Nurses

This paper examines the effects of immigration on a specific occupation, registered nurses (RNs). To learn whether immigrant nurses reduced the earnings of RNs, we applied techniques developed by Goldin (1994) and Borjas, Freeman, and Katz (1996), but found the effect of immigrant penetration either positive or insignificant. We also found that the supply of immigrant RNs was far more elastic than the supply coming from natives. It is often argued that it will be hard to detect negative effects on wages and employment of natives in local markets, because natives will avoid a market which many immigrants have entered. This study finds no support for this hypothesis in this market, based on data that measures the rate of entry of RNs exactly. We find no adverse effect of immigration on native workers in this occupation.     

U.S. House Prices over the Last 30 Years: Bubbles,Regime Shifts and Market (In)Efficiency

This paper studies U.S. house prices across 45 metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2012. It applies a version of the Gordon dividend discount model for long‐run “fundamentals” and uses Mean Group and Pooled Mean Group estimation to estimate long‐run and short‐run determinants of house prices. We find great similarity across cities in that the long‐run house prices are largely explained by the same fundamentals; the long‐run rent to price ratio is approximately 5% plus 0.75 times the real interest rate (which is on the order of 2%). However, adjustments to deviations from the fundamentals are slow, in the long‐run, closing the gap at a rate of around 10% per year. We find sharp differences in short‐run adjustments (momentum) away from the fundamentals across cities, and the differences are correlated with local supply elasticities (more momentum with lower elasticity). Analysis of residuals suggests strong cyclical deviations, which are mean‐reverting.     

Financing Residential Development with Special Districts

This paper empirically examines the extent to which the property tax liability created by financing residential infrastructure using special district bonds is capitalized in house prices. We compare house prices for single‐family detached homes built within development districts to similar properties located outside development districts. Our hedonic specification includes the usual housing characteristics and controls for the influence of spatial attributes using Census Block Group “neighborhood” fixed effects. The preferred empirical specification restricts the data to neighborhoods that have numerous sales of recently constructed single‐family detached homes located both within and outside development districts. The empirical results indicate that house prices for homes located within development districts are lower than house prices for similar homes located outside of development districts, but the amount of property tax capitalization is significantly less than full. Results depend on our Generalized Methods of Moments estimator, which instruments property tax rates using the characteristics of development districts. We identify valid instruments by restricting transactions to properties located in rapidly growing suburban developments.     

Skilled Immigration,Innovation, and the Wages of Native‐Born Americans

The paper examines the effects of skilled immigration on wages that can be credited to immigrants’ contribution to innovation. Using both individual and state‐level datasets from the United States, we find a significant and positive effect of immigration on wages that is attributable to skilled immigrants’ contribution to innovation. Our results confirm previous findings that immigrants contribute substantially to the host economy's innovation, which is a major driver of technological progress and productivity growth. When we augment the analysis to an immigration–innovation–wages nexus, the results suggest that as the share of skilled immigrants in a particular skill group increases, the wages of both natives and immigrants in that group also get a positive boost. We also identify evidence in favor of a positive spillover effect of skilled immigrants on a state's wage level of all workers, including those who do not directly contribute to innovation.     

The Effects of Minimum Wages on Low‐Skilled Immigrants’ Wages,Employment, and Poverty

Raising the minimum wage has been advanced as complementary policy to comprehensive immigration reform to improve low‐skilled immigrants’ economic well‐being. While adverse labor demand effects could undermine this goal, existing studies do not detect evidence of negative employment effects. We re‐investigate this question using data from the 1994 to 2016 Current Population Survey and conclude that minimum wage increases reduced employment of less‐educated Hispanic immigrants, with estimated elasticities of around –0.1. However, we also find that the wage and employment effects of minimum wages on low‐skilled immigrants diminished over the last decade. This finding is consistent with more restrictive state immigration policies and the Great Recession inducing outmigration of low‐skilled immigrants, as well as immigrants moving into the informal sector. Finally, our results show that raising the minimum wage is an ineffective policy tool for reducing poverty among immigrants.     

Immigrants and Mortgage Delinquency

This article studies the effect of immigrant status on mortgage delinquency. Due to their different social and economic background, immigrant households may not integrate well into the host society, and therefore are more likely to be delinquent on mortgages than otherwise identical native‐born households. We test this hypothesis by comparing the mortgage delinquency rate between immigrant and native‐born households in the 2009 PSID (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data, in which all the immigrant households have been in the United States for more than 10 years. We find that, after controlling for observables, those relatively recent immigrants who have been in the United States for 10 to 20 years have a higher mortgage delinquency rate than native‐born, while immigrants who have resided in the United States for more than 20 years are no different from native‐borns. In addition, there is no evidence that the second generation of immigrants is more likely to be delinquent than the third‐or‐higher generations. Our results are robust to potential sample‐selection bias and functional misspecifications.     

Local Immigration Enforcement and Local Economies

We examine the impacts of a locally enforced immigration program—287(g)—on private employer reports to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Using contiguous‐county pairs to account for time‐varying local economic shocks, we identify impacts on immigrant‐intensive industries that are robust to prepolicy time trends, implementation timing, and the exclusion of pairs with large prepolicy differences. Reported employment was 4 percent higher in manufacturing, but 7–10 percent lower in administrative services. These results are consistent with adverse labor‐supply shocks, and, to a lesser extent, a decline in labor demand for locally produced goods and services.     

Do the urban poor face higher food prices? Evidence from Vietnam

Whether there is a poverty penalty, in terms of food prices, is unsettled in the literature after more than four decades of study. Unit values from household surveys suggest that prices vary with income while outlet surveys typically find food prices varying with store type but not with neighborhood income. Most outlet surveys are from rich countries, with just one spatially limited study from a developing country. In this paper we use especially collected food price data from metropolitan areas of Vietnam to test whether the urban poor face higher food prices. Food prices in low-income neighborhoods are 1% lower, on average, than in other neighborhoods. Unit values give a different answer to the question of whether the poor face higher prices and are not suited to answer such a question.     

Estimating Loan‐to‐Value Distributions

We estimate a model of house prices, combined loan‐to‐value ratios (CLTVs) and trade and foreclosure behavior. House prices are only observed for traded properties and trades are endogenous, creating sample‐selection problems for existing approaches to estimating CLTVs. We use a Bayesian filtering procedure to recover the price path for individual properties and produce selection‐corrected estimates of historical CLTV distributions. Estimating our model with transactions of residential properties in Alameda, California, we find that 35% of single‐family homes are underwater, compared to 19% estimated by existing approaches. Our results reduce the index revision problem and have applications for pricing mortgage‐backed securities.     

Local House Price Dynamics: New Indices and Stylized Facts

We introduce the first publicly available data set of constant‐quality house price indices for counties, ZIP codes and census tracts in the United States, at an annual frequency, over a 40‐year period. Between 1990 and 2015, house price gradients within large cities steepen, documenting a reversal of decades of increasing relative desirability of suburban locations. Real house prices are more likely to be nonstationary near the centers of large cities. Within‐city differences in house price appreciation at the ZIP code level are, on average, about half of between‐city differences, though this ratio varies depending on the time period and city size.     

The Accuracy of Owner-Provided House Values: The 1978–1991 American Housing Survey

The American Housing Survey (AHS) includes the owner's valuation of the house as a measure of the house's value. If owner-stated values are accurate, the AHS (as well as other survey instruments) can be used by researchers studying a variety of topics. In this study we use the metropolitan version of the AHS for three cities over fourteen years to compare owners' valuations with sales prices of houses that sold in the twelve months prior to an interview. We find that, on average, recent buyers report house values that are 8.4% higher than the stated sales prices. Further analysis indicates that these recent buyers, when compared with owners with longer tenure, overvalue their houses by 3.3%, on average. Thus, we find that the average owner overvalues his house by 5.1%. Also, differences between sales prices and owners' valuations are not related to particular characteristics of the house, occupants (other than length of tenure), or neighborhood. Thus, the use of the owners' valuations will result in accurate estimates of house price indexes and will provide reliable estimates of the prices of house and neighborhood characteristics.     

House Search Duration in Hot and Cold Residential Markets

This study analyzes the determinants of house search duration of consumption‐driven buyers and individual investors in different housing market environments. We use data from surveys of recent house‐buyers in “hot” and “cold” housing markets in the 2000s housing bubble in California characterized by rising and declining residential house prices, respectively. The average house price and the surveyed geographical area are the same for both periods. Expected house ownership horizon is shown to be an important determinant of the realized search duration in addition to commonly considered housing and buyer characteristics. We find a statistically significant positive effect of it on the time until purchase in both housing price environments for consumption‐driven buyers. We also find that consumption‐driven house purchases were highly pronounced in coastal areas in the hot market and inland areas in the cold market. In contrast, long‐horizon investment activity leads that of consumption activity in those areas. Short‐horizon investors, on the other hand, concentrated their house search activity in inland areas in both housing market environments.     

Are Investors the Bad Guys? Tenure and Neighborhood Stability in Chelsea,Massachusetts

In this article, we examine the role of investors and occupant‐owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts, because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between occupant‐owners and investors using local data, and we find that many investors are misclassified as occupant‐owners in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid‐2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the mortgage foreclosure risk of occupant‐owners, conditional on financing. Nonlocal investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant‐owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant‐owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.     

Contact High: The External Effects of Retail Marijuana Establishments on House Prices

Using publicly available data from the city of Denver and the state of Colorado, this study examines the effects of retail conversions (conversions from medical marijuana to retail marijuana stores) on neighboring house values in Denver, CO. The study period reflects a time before and after retail marijuana sales became legal in Colorado in 2014. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we compare houses that were in close proximity to a conversion (within 0.1 miles) to those that are farther away from a conversion. We find that single‐family residences close to a retail conversion increased in value by approximately 8% relative to houses that are located slightly farther away. We perform a battery of robustness checks and falsification tests to provide additional support for this finding. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine at a microlevel the highly localized effect of retail marijuana establishments on house prices and hope that it can contribute to the debate on retail marijuana laws.     

Owner-occupancy fraud and mortgage performance

We identify occupancy fraud—borrowers who misrepresent their occupancy status as owner-occupants rather than investors—in residential mortgage originations. Unlike previous work, we show that fraud was prevalent in originations not just during the housing bubble but also persists through more recent times. We also demonstrate that fraud is broad-based and appears in government-sponsored enterprise and bank portfolio loans, not just in private securitization; these fraudulent borrowers make up one third of the effective investor population. Occupancy frauds obtain credit at lower interest rates, suggesting a motivation for undertaking fraud. These fraudulent borrowers perform substantially worse than similar declared investors, defaulting at a 75% higher rate. We also provide evidence consistent with fraudulent borrowers’ defaults being more “strategic,” suggesting that this population poses a risk in the face of declining house prices.     

Homeownership Determinants for Chinese Americans: Assimilation, Ethnic Concentration and Nativity

Chinese homeownership rates in the Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area adjusted by socioeconomic and housing market characteristics are, on average, 18 percentage points higher than those of native white households. This finding runs contrary to most immigration literature, which suggests that immigrants usually lag behind the host society in measures of economic well-being. This study focuses on two additional factors, which most economic studies of homeownership choice ignore, that may play a role in helping Chinese households achieve high homeownership in ways that other immigrant groups do not. The results of this analysis find that the high homeownership rates cannot be explained by the English skills of households. The cultural influence of homeowning peers may have partially contributed to the higher homeownership of Chinese households. While living in ethnic Chinese communities lowers homeownership rates, in general, it helps improve the likelihood that Chinese immigrants will own a home. Finally, we find that there is great diversity among Chinese subgroups with respect to their likelihood of owning a home, but very little diversity with respect to the education and income level of Chinese households across subgroups.     

Amenity‐Based Housing Affordability Indexes

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate‐income households, especially in high‐cost, supply‐constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town‐level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town‐level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability.