COVID-19 and Housing Prices : Evidence from U.S. County-Level Data

This paper investigates the effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on housing prices at the U.S. county level. The effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices are formally investigated by using a difference-in-difference design, where county-specific factors, time-specific factors, and mobility measures of individuals are controlled for. The empirical results show evidence for negative and significant effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices, robust to the consideration of several permutation tests. Investigating the channels of causality results in showing that the negative effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices are more evident in counties with higher poverty rates. Exclusion tests further suggest that the empirical results are partly driven by U.S. counties in the state of California or the month of May 2020, although the results based on other counties and months are still in line with the benchmark results