Subtle discrimination in the rental housing market: Evidence from e-mail correspondence with landlords

We find that landlords practice subtle discrimination in the rental housing market through the use of language associated with describing and viewing a unit, inviting further correspondence, making a formal greeting, and using polite language when replying to e-mail inquiries from a white name more often than to an African American name, they also send longer e-mails and respond quicker to white names.     

Questions about the equivalence of market rents and user costs for owner occupied housing

For modern nations, it is recognized as important that temporal and spatial variations in costs for comparable dwelling services are carefully measured. The costs of owner occupied as well as rental housing have important roles to play in both the consumer price index (CPI) and the System of National Accounts (SNA). The 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA93) specifies that a rental value of the housing stock should be included as part of the aggregates for personal consumption, personal income, income of proprietors and value added for the real estate industry. Yet, little attention has been devoted to an underlying commonality of practice: the implicit assumption that housing cost information for either renters or owner occupiers can be used for assessing movements over time and spatial differences in the cost of housing for both renters and owners, after allowing for differences regarding payment for taxes and certain ongoing expenses such as insurance and utilities. But in the real world, are the services that renters and owner occupiers get from their dwellings comparable? Also, for both renters and owner occupiers, are there place-related differences in the services they derive from their dwellings? And if so, what are the implications for official statistics making? These are the questions raised by the empirical results presented in this paper.     

香港住房市场中的政府干预及其启示

首先回顾了香港政府干预私人住房市场的背景和已经使用的政策措施,然后系统总结了其在不同市场条件下干预住房市场的政策选择,并分析了使用这些干预政策所取得的效果。结果表明,香港政府对住房市场的干预,在一定程度上减小了市场波动带来的冲击,但也存在干预目标不能及时调整、货币政策工具有效性未如预期及对需求的干预重视不足等问题。分析研究香港政府干预住房市场的经验与局限性,有利于内地政府提高干预住房市场的有效性。     

Price discrimination in the housing market

There is little credible evidence on whether price discrimination exists in the housing market. Using a large sample of single-family home sales from Florida where both the race of the seller and buyer are known, we present evidence using the traditional and Harding et al. [HRS, Harding, J.P., Rosenthal, S., Sirmans, D.F., 2003. Establishing bargaining power in the market for existing homes. The Review of Economics and Statistics 85, (1) 178–188] approaches to empirical estimation. Omitted variable bias is found to plague the traditional approach. Results from following the HRS approach indicate that price discrimination exists by whites and Hispanics against blacks and Asians. Price discrimination against blacks is restricted to non-majority black neighborhoods and is smaller in magnitude in neighborhoods containing younger and more educated homeowners.     

Contract equilibria in a regulated rental housing market

Various contractual equilibrium concepts for a regulated rental housing market are studied in this paper. Regulation refers to rental contracts with institutionally prescribed structures and rental prices, a situation common for housing markets with restrictive rental protection legislation. Contracts can then be considered as indivisible commodities with certain unusual characteristics. Existence of equilibria of the various types is shown under rather weak assumptions.     

A commodity hierarchy model of the rental housing market

This paper presents and analyzes a theoretical model of the rental housing market which addresses the durable-good nature and the heterogeneous nature of housing, while focusing on the quality distribution of housing units. Units of different qualities are viewed as distinct substitute commodities. New construction rates, deterioration rates, rental prices, and stocks are considered to be endogenous. Equilibrium concepts are introduced; both the long-run and short-run equilibria are shown to exist and to be unique. Comparative static results are established. The model's utility is demonstrated by its application to the analysis of several housing market programs.     

Racial discrimination in the Boston housing market

Recent studies suggest that price differentials between what whites and blacks pay for housing are largely a function of changes in supply and demand in the two submarkets. These studies, however, estimate models that assume a unified housing market. As a result, imputed prices of housing attributes cannot vary with location, and the analyses obscure important racial price differentials. Based on a more realistic and complex housing market theory, the model described in this paper indicates that housing prices are substantially higher in the ghetto and transition areas than in white areas, and that within the same area blacks must pay more than whites for equivalent housing.     

公租房小区的特征及治理

公租房小区有三个特征:一是租房者和买房者的混居;二是政府在公租房小区有着相当比重的经济利益;三是居民都是社会的收入中下阶层。公租房小区要避免变成贫民窟,其关键之一是中下阶层的居民能够也愿意参与到小区的治理中来。在此基础上,公租房小区的治理应该强调以小区居民代表为主体组成小区管理委员会,居民代表由居民大会选举产生,买房者的投票权高于租房者,政府代表拥有一定比例的投票权。     

公共租赁房退出机制及其政策选择

我国正在大力发展公共租赁房,但对公共租赁房退出机制的理论研究目前仍比较缺乏。在梳理相关文献的基础上,运用博弈论和比较研究的方法,指出政府管理部门应采取的策略,并对公共租赁房不同退出机制的效果进行了分析。结合我国的实际情况,认为应采取自愿退出、强制退出和激励退出相结合的方式创新我国公共租赁房的退出机制。     

中外公共租赁住房租金定价机制比较研究

在简要介绍公共租赁住房概念与内涵的基础上,总结并比较了国内外公共租赁住房租金定价模式的特点与异同,分析了当前我国公共租赁住房的租金定价面临的难点与困惑,对我国公共租赁住房租金定价的作用机制与定价方法的优劣进行了探讨。从定价基准、补贴力度、保障形式和配套政策等方面总结了国内外公共租赁住房租金定价的经验,并就制度设计、操作流程、管理体制、价格机制、法律法规以及金融制度等方面提出了相关配套措施。     

The housing bubble and a new approach to accounting for housing in a CPI

Over the course of the recent house price bubble in the United States, the price of homes rose rapidly from 1999 Q4 to 2005 Q4 (11.3% annually as measured by the Case-Shiller index, and 8.4% annually as measured by the Federal Housing Financing Agency) but slowly as measured by owner equivalent rents (3.4%), so measured core inflation remained relatively docile during this period, since only rents are used to measure inflation for housing services in the United States. Over the last several decades, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has experimented with both rental equivalence and user cost approaches for accounting for owner occupied housing (OOH) services in the CPI. We explain the basics of these approaches, and outline the BLS experiences with using them. This assessment leads us to conclude that the time has come to try a new approach: the opportunity cost approach. We argue this approach has advantages over both the conventional rental equivalence and user cost approaches, though it embeds components of the measures for both those approaches and builds solidly on the research of Verbrugge and others at the BLS. Also, we take up empirical issues that must be faced regardless of which of the approaches discussed is adopted. We explain how the repeat-sales and various hedonic regression methods can be placed in a common framework, thereby facilitating understanding of the properties of and the tradeoffs between the methods. We also consider measurement complications that arise because the land and structure components of properties depreciate at different rates.     

A field study of rental market discrimination across origins in France

Discrimination against particular groups in the housing market increases search costs and limits optimal matching, thus resulting in economic and social inefficiencies. This paper tests for the existence of discrimination in the French rental market against individuals with names which signal their connection to five immigrant groups (Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Poland, Portugal-Spain) by implementing an online field study using one of France's largest online advertisements website. The results show that applicants with foreign sounding names coming from Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey are 16 to 22 percentage points less likely to receive a response than applicants with French names or names associated with Poland, Portugal or Spain. In addition, when applicants with foreign sounding names from any origin receive a response, it is significantly more likely to be negative or include a request for more information than responses to emails including French sounding names. Finally, we find some geographic differences in response rate differentials that are correlated with differences in the local income and share of immigrants. This provides evidence that landlords use names as a proxy for economic and other sociodemographic characteristics.     

Household mobility in New York City’s regulated rental housing market

This study analyzes the effect New York City’s rent regulation regime has on household mobility. Using a panel dataset from the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, we estimate the costs and benefits to a particular household of remaining in a regulated unit each period; then in a second stage, we include the benefits of regulations (lowered rent) and the corresponding costs (from disequilibrium in consumption) as explanatory variables in two mobility models. Both logit and survival models confirm that larger benefits in one period are associated with a lower probability of moving in a second period. Similarly, larger costs (distortions in housing consumption) in one period are associated with a higher probability of moving later. While these effects are modest, they are statistically significant. The benefit and cost effects are, however, not symmetric; the pro-mobility effects of costs are roughly twice as large as the anti-mobility effects of benefits. This provides limited support for the relative loss aversion hypothesis of behavioral economics. This support is limited due to the lack of robustness of the result.     

Forecasting the US housing market

The recent housing market boom and bust in the United States illustrates that real estate returns are characterized by short-term positive serial correlation and long-term mean reversion to fundamental values. We develop an econometric model that includes these two components, but with weights that vary dynamically through time depending on recent forecasting performances. The smooth transition weighting mechanism can assign more weight to positive serial correlation in boom times, and more weight to reversal to fundamental values during downturns. We estimate the model with US national house price index data. In-sample, the switching mechanism significantly improves the fit of the model. In an out-of-sample forecasting assessment the model performs better than competing benchmark models.     

Land rent and housing policy: a case study of the San Francisco Bay area rental housing market

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where residential rent is among the highest in the United States, an analysis of data from several sources demonstrates that high rent cannot be accounted for by higher quality, higher operating costs, or higher construction costs. At least one-third of the total rent paid is land rent. Despite increases in real incomes, very-low-income tenants in the Bay Area today have less income remaining after payment of rent than tenants did in 1960. High land rent is a long-term feature of the Bay Area rental market that results mostly from its geography, the density of its urban centers, and a strong economy, rather than from regulatory barriers to new multifamily construction. Deregulation is not a sufficient response to the effects of land rent on low-income tenants. Government should subsidize non-profit housing organizations, particularly land trusts that remove residential land from the market. Taxes on land rent would be a particularly appropriate funding source.     

从出租屋看农民工市民化的困境

出租屋是农民工在打工地的主要居住方式。其基本特征是:大多数位于城乡结合部;大多数建在宅基地上;运作成本低廉,成为出租屋主财产性收入的重要来源;显著不同于国外的贫民窟;获得农民工较高的满意度。存在的主要问题是:政府对出租屋的规划管理具有滞后性;在法律上还没有承认出租屋的合法地位;对出租屋流动人口管理服务有待于进一步加强。有关的政策建议是:高度重视出租屋的地位和作用;加强对农民工居住的出租屋的研究,建立健全有关法律法规;科学制定城镇规划;加快宅基地、农村集体建设用地改革步伐;保持"以屋管人"的连续性。     

A theoretical and empirical analysis of the length of residency discount in the rental housing market

We present an analysis of occupancy discounts and suggest a decomposition of the discount into two components, a “sit” discount and a length of residency discount. Data from the national longitudinal survey of the Annual Housing Survey in which 75,000 housing units from around the United States were followed from 1974 to 1977 are used to obtain consistent and efficient estimates of those discounts. The econometric models account for censoring in the data by endogenously treating the tenant's staying decision. The estimation indicates that neither discount is significant. This result is contrary to the commonly accepted result in the urban literature that landlords offer discounts to their current tenants when contracts are renegotiated.     

经济适用房市场的问题与解决对策

经济适用房是国家为了解决城市中低收入者住房困难 ,采取减免地租、税收等政策来降低建房成本 ,使中低收入者能够买得起的一种房屋。从 1 998年开始 ,经济适用房在全国范围内出现以来 ,各地的经济适用房市场发展态势良好 ,很多地方都出现了供销两旺的局面。但在经济适用房市场的发展过程中 ,也出现了很多问题 ,本文分析了这些问题并提出了解决措施。     

澳大利亚住房负担能力评析

由于住房政策的转变以及经济社会因素的变化,澳大利亚同我国一样正经历着严峻的住房负担能力问题。通过文献研究的方法,从澳大利亚住房负担问题的概念、产生的背景、问题的原因与影响等几个方面对澳大利亚住房负担能力问题的相关研究成果进行了阐述,并通过这些研究成果提出了我国住房负担能力问题研究的新思路和新视角:一是研究方法的借鉴,二是研究领域的扩展,三是应给予住房供给更多关注。     

Reconciling user costs and rental equivalence: Evidence from the US consumer expenditure survey

Previous research [Verbrugge, Randal, 2008a. The puzzling divergence of aggregate rents and user costs, 1980–2004. The Review of Income and Wealth 54(4), 671–699] demonstrated that housing rents and ex ante user costs diverge markedly for extended periods of time, a finding with profound implications for income and inflation measurement. But the primary data sources in that study were various indexes, based upon largely disjoint data sources, constructed using different aggregation techniques, and each subject to various criticisms. This raised doubts about the quality of the comparison. The relationship between user costs and rents might well be much tighter at the micro level; after all, house prices and rents (and their growth rates) can vary dramatically within cities, and rents are notoriously sticky. Furthermore, the use of indexes precludes both cross-sectional and dollar cost comparisons. In this study, we use Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CE) data to examine the relationship between user costs and rents at the individual unit-level, in dollars, using unit-level information on house value, rent, taxes, and the like. This allows us to accurately estimate unit-specific user costs and to control for unobservables like structure and neighborhood quality. We also make the point that in theory, after-tax user costs should equal net rent, i.e., expected rental income, rather than gross rent.Our findings are striking. In keeping with most previous research, we find tremendous divergence between conventional measures of user costs and net rents, thus ruling out index construction errors as a possible explanation. This divergence does not result from a faulty rent measure: we find that reported rents are sensible, in that they move similarly to official rent indexes, and are not simply out-of-pocket expenses. Instead, and most perplexing, we find a surprisingly close correspondence between net rents and a particular estimate of user costs, one implicitly assuming zero transactions costs and constructed using an appreciation measure that is both theoretically suspect and empirically a poor predictor of actual appreciation.