Download or read book Essays on Household Behavior in the Housing Market written by Yuanjie Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: My research focuses on three aspects of household behavior in the housing market: second generation immigrant decisions of whether to own or rent, and the effect of risky borrowers' adverse selection into down payment assistance and the assistance characteristics on loan defaults.

Download or read book House Prices and Household Behavior written by Kevin Russell Krivacsy and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Residential property values have only recently recovered from the effects of the Great Recession and the housing bubble and burst. During this period, cities were not collecting as much tax revenue as predicted because of depressed housing prices and the global economy suffered greatly because of it.Economists and others have studied the causes of the instability in property values in recent years from many angles. Their research has been influential in explaining what happened to the housing market during that time. Yet, what is missing is a detailed level analysis of how the spatial structure of our cities may contribute to this instability or stability in residential property values and a better understanding of their local dynamics.While economists are likely correct in their macroeconomic focus, there is still room for research on the role that local factors may have played or will play in the determination of residential property values. Even within metropolitan areas, there may have been a difference in magnitude of property value fluctuation.Therefore, this study focuses on the extent to which the urban form may contribute to overall economic stability as seen through the stability of residential property values. This research builds on past research by 1) incorporating more detailed and accurate neighborhood measures, 2) contributing to the literature by conducting cointegration at a very local level and 3) assessing the impact that neighborhood, demographic and economic attributes at the local level may have on the long-term stability of property values in our urban areas.

Download or read book Three Essays on Sellers Behavior in the Housing Market written by Svetoslava N. Alexandrova and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housing markets exhibit some puzzling behavior that cannot be completely explained by rational market dynamics. The neoclassical economic theory posits that rational sellers and rational buyers in the housing market will look at the current market price in order to determine a value of a property. Studies, however, show that physiological biases may affect the decision- making process of both sellers and buyers.I examine the behavior of sellers in the housing market in three different settings. In Essay 1, I analyze the effects of the health of the housing market on mobility. In Essay 2, I study the effects of sellers' loss aversion on listing price and time on the market within the prospect theory framework. In Essay 3, I focus on identifying stress in the housing market by developing a stress index and commencing the design of an Early Warning System that incorporates signals from the market and behaviors from sellers to indicate increasing levels of pressure. I utilize a data set of private home sale transactions of corporate relocations for the period 2004-2014. The results of the first study from the stepwise logit models on series of economic variables and demographic factors show that relocating employees facing negative equity situations and equity less than 5% of home value have a greater chance of rejecting relocation while economic factors like affordability and credit availability have a positive effect on their ability to move. Essay 2 results indicate that a seller who faces a loss will set up an asking price 5.69 percent higher than they would otherwise. Additionally, sellers facing a loss will experience a reduction in the hazard rate of sale resulting in longer time on the market while income and family status have effect on loss aversion and time on market. In the last essay, I hypothesize that economic signals and home sellers' behaviors can explain the variability of the housing market stress index proxied by a transformed S&P 500/Case Shiller Index. The preliminary results of the autoregressive models find that housing variables and market expectations of the 'informed sellers' have statistically significant explanatory power.

Download or read book Essays on the Household level Effects of House Price Growth written by Claudia Ayanna Sitgraves and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the effects of fluctuations in housing values on household saving and investment decisions. Chapter 1 examines the relationship between changes in housing values and household saving decisions. Fluctuations in housing values may affect household saving and consumption by increasing households' perceived wealth, or by relaxing borrowing constraints. Moreover, the increased liquidity of home equity during the recent housing boom may have led household behavior to respond more than in past years to changes in housing wealth. This chapter is the first analysis to provide evidence from household-level microdata suggesting that the housing wealth effect may have increased in line with increased access to housing-collateralized debt. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the years 1984 - 2003, I estimate an average elasticity of household active saving with respect to MSA-level house prices of -0.222, which corresponds to a 1 cent decrease in annual active saving when housing wealth increases by 1 dollar. When I estimate housing wealth effects separately between 1984 and 1990, and between 1996 and 2003, I find smaller effects during the earlier period, but large and significant effects during the later period. During the later period, I estimate an average elasticity of household active saving with respect to MSA-level house prices of -1.044, which corresponds to a 3 cent decrease in annual active saving when housing wealth increases by 1 dollar. Further evidence comparing the magnitude of the wealth effect between different subpopulations -- older homeowners versus younger homeowners, and recent homebuyers versus those with longer tenure -- suggests that a relaxation of liquidity constraints, rather than changes in the composition of the homeowner population, is a central factor contributing to the increase in the housing wealth effect. Chapter 2 explores the connection between growth in housing values, uncertainty over future housing values, and property owners' investments in housing. Residential housing is a significant share of most American households' asset holdings. As such, the decision to build, to buy, or to make significant improvements to a home is driven not only by consumption considerations, but is also an investment decision. By modeling property owners' housing investment decisions using a framework of optimal capital investment where investments are irreversible and there is uncertainty in future asset values, this analysis theoretically predicts and empirically estimates the extent to which property owners respond to changes in the profitability of housing investment by making investments in their stock of housing. Using a unique dataset of residential sales, geographic information, and the universe of building permits issued in Los Angeles between 1999 and 2008, and focusing on nonresident landlords and "improver-movers"--Owner-occupiers who make improvements to their properties and subsequently sell the property, I find that when housing values increase, property owners are more likely to make capital investments, and that the value and square footage of these investments is larger. When house price volatility is high, property owners are less likely to make investments. However, conditional on the decision to invest, the value and square footage of investments is larger. This result is shown to be a consequence of property owners' optimally delaying capital investment when uncertainty over future prices is high. Chapter 3 documents the extent to which residential real estate development is cyclical - exhibiting periods of rapid expansion followed by periods of rapid contraction - using New York City as a case study. This chapter provides an overview of residential development activity in New York City during the years 2000 - 2008. In this analysis, I describe the effects of this real estate "boom" on the housing market in New York City during these years, and characterize the long-term effects of the "boom" and subsequent "bust" in residential development on the composition of the City's housing stock. Economic theories of cyclicality in real estate markets, outlined in this chapter, show that uncertainty over the exact timing of price declines coupled with a long development lag can lead to buildings being completed and new units entering the market even as prices decline. Although the elasticity of housing supply is lower in New York City than in other areas, building activity tends to follow a boom-and-bust pattern similar to other areas. Neighborhoods with higher levels of amenities experienced more growth in residential housing supply, and public involvement in development activity (both to facilitate and to restrict development) became less important for builders as the boom progressed. As building activity slows, City officials and developers are taking steps to ensure that stalled construction sites, rather than becoming eyesores and safety hazards, are preserved for future use.

Download or read book Essays in Household Finance and Housing Economics written by Cindy K. Soo and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Housing and Labor Markets written by Bulent Guler and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, I study the effects of innovations in information technology on the housing market. Specifically, I focus on the improved ability of lenders to assess the credit risk of home buyers, which has become possible with the emergence of automated underwriting systems in the United States in the mid-1990s. I develop a standard life-cycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic income uncertainty. I explicitly model the housing tenure choice of the households: rent/purchase decision for renters and stay/sell/default decision for homeowners. Risk-free lenders offer mortgage contracts to prospective home buyers and the terms of these contracts depend on the observable characteristics of households. Households are born as either good credit risk types--having a high time discount factor--or bad types--having a low time discount factor. The type of the household is the only source of asymmetric information between households and lenders. I find that as lenders have better information about the type of households, the average down payment fraction decreases together with an increase in the average mortgage premium, the foreclosure rate, and the dispersions of mortgage interest rates and down payment fractions, which are consistent with the trends in the housing market in the last 15 years. From a welfare perspective, I find that better information, on average, makes households better off. In the second chapter, I focus on the labor market behavior of couples. Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners--in couples and families--and decisions are made jointly. This chapter studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pool income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint-search yields new opportunities--similar to on-the job search--relative to the single-agent search. Second, when couples face offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint-search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the relation between house prices and interest rates. Although interest rates and housing prices seem mostly to have a negative relation in the data, the relation does not seem to be stable. For example, the recent run up in the global housing prices is generally explained by globally low interest rates. On the other hand, there have been periods where housing prices and interest rates moved together. Motivated by these observations, I formulate a two period OLG model to find out the form of the relationship between interest rates and housing prices. It appears that the distribution of homeownership is also important for housing price dynamics. I show that housing prices in the equilibrium do not always have a negative relation with interest rates.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Housing Markets written by Andres J Yany Anich and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two essays that examine households' behavior in housing markets. The first chapter studies the effects on rental markets of providing tax-funded legal representation ("Right to Counsel") to tenants facing an eviction process. Stronger tenant protections provide greater insurance to household who benefit from accruing larger amounts of debt and paying lower monetary costs when defaulting on rent. However, stronger tenant protections translate into higher default costs for landlords and, in equilibrium, higher rental rates, that limit renters' ability to pay affordable houses and can potentially push them to homelessness. To quantitatively measure the welfare implications of providing legal representation to tenants, we develop and solve a heterogenous agent life cycle model of the rental markets where households can default on rent and face different exogenous risk factors. We find that "Right to Counsel" causes rental rates to increase due to greater default risk faced by landlords. As a consequence, housing quality allocation falls for riskier tenants. While eviction-filing rates increase due to lower default costs, evictions are less likely, resulting in similar eviction rates before and after implementing the policy. Quantitatively, results suggest positive effects on young and low-income households that benefit from greater insurance provided by a more lenient eviction regime. The second chapter introduces a new measure of self-assessed financial literacy that plays an important role in understanding household behavior in housing markets. Households who self-assess themselves to be more financially literate are more likely to own a house and lever more. We solve a heterogeneous agent portfolio choice model to understand how self-assessed financial literacy affects mortgage terms and expectations on housing returns to generate the cross-sectional patterns. Our results show that households with higher levels of self-assessed financial literacy face better credit conditions and expect higher risk-adjusted returns on their housing asset. In particular, we find that financially knowledgeable households access better mortgage terms when they are young and higher risk-adjusted returns on the housing asset when they are old. Finally we estimate and compare housing demand elasticity with respect to wealth in models with and without financial literacy. We find that housing demand elasticity is approximately 40% lower when taking self-assessed financial literacy into account.

Download or read book Essays on Household Behavior written by Marlena Iris Lee and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Housing Choices and Consumer Behavior written by Li Ma and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third chapter "The Impact of Borrowing Constraints on the Homeownership of Chinese Households" addresses the effect of borrowing constraints in the mortgage market on the tenure choice of Chinese households. The termination of housing allocation system in 1994 is one of the most important reforms in Chinese economy during past decades. Millions of Chinese households became homeowners after this housing reform, and a market-based housing system was established. Since then, Chinese housing mortgage market has boomed and by 2005 China had become the largest residential mortgage market in Asia. This chapter examines the effect of borrowing constraints in mortgage market on the tenure choice of Chinese households. The result shows that few Chinese households are constrained by the down payment criterion. With limited lending sources and a relatively high housing price-to-income ratio, they are more likely to be constrained by the income criterion. Empirical work indicates that a one thousand dollar increase in the family's permanent income increases the likelihood of owning a housing unit by 11.8%. Moreover, highly income-constrained households are 8.6% less likely to become homeowners.

Download or read book Essays on Household Behavior and Time use written by Daniel Hallberg and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Housing Market Behavior Analysis Within the International Context written by Diehang Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Applied Spatial Econometrics and Housing Economics written by Hua Kiefer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housing purchase represents one of a household's most significant economic decisions. The ancient joke in real estate is that the three most important criteria for selecting a house are location, location, and location. This explains the great emphasis of a household on residential location choice when he/she is buying a home. Driven by households' demand on location, it should also play an important role in determining house prices. As a key determinant in household consumption behavior, locational context or neighborhood effects is worth investigation. This dissertation examines locational/neighborhood effects in the housing market using spatial econometric methods.

Download or read book Four Essays on Housing Market Dynamics written by Yasuhiro Nakagami and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Two Essays on Spatial Skill Sorting and Household Saving Behavior written by Minjuan Sun and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies two wide ranging phenomena and their socio-economic impacts: urban divergence in terms of geographical skill sorting and fast rising housing prices. The first essay explores the empirical pattern as well as the driving forces behind the American cities' diverging path over the past forty years. Compared to the rest of the U.S. cities, the top 20 largest cities have been growing faster in several aspects, such as city-average wage, housing price, and measured innovation intensity (e.g., patents, venture capital). In addition, this geographical divergence has contributed substantially to the rising inequality in America. To explore the causes of this divergence, this paper constructs a spatial sorting model where entrepreneurs with different talents can freely move across cities. The key idea is that cities with advantages in innovation attract more productive entrepreneurs and more workers, thereby driving up wages and housing prices. Two things distinguish my models from others: 1. Large cities are having endogenous innovation advantage in equilibrium; 2. I can freely explore the driving forces behind the divergence, with an emphasis on how technology changes can reinforce the spatial sorting mechanism. Specifically, three types of technological changes have increased the benefits of skill clustering in innovative cities: general productivity increases; improvements in communications technologies; and declines in trade costs.The second essay studies how heterogeneous households respond to the fast rising housing prices through their life-cycle behaviors. Chinese housing market has been undergoing a rapid booming period since 1998, causing the house prices increasing significantly. As a result, households endured severe financial burdens to buy homes at price-to-income ratios of around six. Along with the rising house prices, household savings rate has been increasing consistently since 1998. Can the rising house prices be an important factor to explain the increase in household saving rate? This paper develops a life cycle dynastic model with endogenous choice on housing, coresidence and intergenerational transfer, then quantitatively analyze the effect of housing price on household saving. It shows that housing is an important motive for saving, and it accounts for about 35% of the increase in household savings rate. The housing situation affects households' saving behavior through three channels. First, households are financially constrained due to the down payment requirement and they choose to limit their consumption in order to buy houses. Second, young adults live in their parents' houses for a long time and save more intensively, since they get to pay less for the housing expenses under coresidence. Thirdly, older parents make large sum of intergeneration transfer in aid of the children's housing purchase, indicating the housing affordability issue also has influence on old parents' saving decisions.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Consumption and Investment Decisions of Households in the Presence of Housing and Human Capital written by Sebastien Betermier and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in which I study the consumption and investment decisions of households in the presence of two major asset classes: housing and human capital. In the first essay, I analyze how the dual consumption-investment nature of housing affects the consumption dynamics of households. A key feature of the housing market is that for most households, the consumption and investment benefits of housing are non-separable. I propose a tractable theoretical framework to understand the impact of this constraint on the consumption allocation of homeowners who would ideally like to own just a fraction of their home. For these homeowners, the relative cost of living in their home is not just the imputed rental cost. It also includes an opportunity cost of having an unbalanced financial portfolio. This cost varies substantially over time, and it is especially high in good times, when available investment opportunities yield high returns and homeowners allocate a high fraction of their wealth to current consumption. As a result, this cost dampens variations in the level of their housing consumption, and it amplifies variations in both their level of non-housing consumption and the composition of their consumption baskets. I then test empirically this theory in the second essay. Using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I test the hypothesis that homeowners who face a high opportunity cost choose ceteris paribus a low housing consumption volatility. I also develop a method to identify these constrained homeowners by comparing their characteristics to those of a subset of unconstrained homeowners: the landlords. The results are consistent with the predictions of the model. First, the characteristics of homeowners that determine how constrained they are in the model are strong predictors of those homeowners who choose to be landlords in the data. For example, homeowners with a low level of risk aversion, little value for housing consumption, and a long horizon are relatively more likely to be landlords. Second, I find evidence that the more constrained homeowners adjust their level of housing consumption much less over time. In the third essay, which was developed in collaboration with Thomas Jansson, Christine Parlour, and Johan Walden, we investigate the relationship between workers' labor income and their investment decisions. Using a detailed Swedish data set on employment and portfolio holdings we estimate wage volatility and labor productivity for Swedish industries and, motivated by theory, we show that highly labor productive industries are more likely to pay workers variable wages. We also find that both levels and changes in wage volatility are significant in explaining changes in household investment portfolios. A household going from an industry with low wage volatility to one with high volatility will ceteris paribus decrease its portfolio share of risky assets by 25%, i.e., 7,750 USD. Similarly, a household that switches from a low labor productivity industry to one with high labor productivity decreases its risky asset share by 20%. Our results suggest that human capital risk is an important determinant of household portfolio holdings.

Download or read book Essays in Real Estate Finance written by Sheharyar Javaid Bokhari and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a collection of three essays in real estate finance. In the first essay, we observe that between 1985 and 2007, the share of household mortgage debt as a proportion of the total value of housing in the US increased substantially from 30% to an all-time high of 50%. With the decline in house prices, these high levels of leverage increased the propensity at which households defaulted. We examine household decisions on mortgage leverage using new extensive loan-level data from Fannie Mae over the sample period 1986 to 2010. We conceptualize a market for leverage per se and develop a theory of leverage demand-and-supply. Empirically, we estimate an interest rate elasticity of leverage demand of -0.37 or, equivalently, a movement along the demand curve from an r-LTV pair of (10%, 72%) to that of (5%, 85%). We find that leverage demand was cyclical and responsive to economic events but without a general trend. By contrast, leverage supply shifts in the form of lower mortgage interest rates were concurrently associated with higher average loan-to-value ratios. We find that in MSAs with higher house prices, households borrowed more and bought equally more expensive houses. That left leverage unchanged but raised households' risk of illiquidity by increasing their loan-to-income ratios. In MSAs with high house price volatility, we find that both leverage demand and supply were lower. We also identify that younger, poorer and less credit-worthy borrowers demand more leverage than their counterparts. In the second essay, co-authored with David Geltner, we document that loss aversion behavior plays a major role in the pricing of commercial properties, and it varies both across the type of market participants and across the cycle. We find that sophisticated and more experienced investors are at least as loss averse as their counterparts and that loss aversion operated most strongly during the cycle peak in 2007. We also document a possible anchoring effect of the asking price in influencing buyer valuation and subsequent transaction price. We demonstrate the importance of behavioral phenomena in constructing hedonic price indices, and we find that the impact of loss aversion is attenuated at the aggregate market level. This suggests that the pricing and volume cycle during 2001 - 2009 was little affected by loss aversion. In the third essay, also co-authored with David Geltner, we present a technique to address the problem of data scarcity in the construction of high-frequency real estate price indexes. We introduce a two-stage frequency conversion procedure, by first estimating lower-frequency indexes staggered in time, and then applying a generalized inverse estimator to convert from lower to higher frequency return series. The two-stage procedure can improve the accuracy of high-frequency indexes in scarce data environments. The method is demonstrated and analyzed by application to empirical commercial property repeat-sales data.