"Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and...

We examine how exogenous changes in exposure to air pollution over the past two decades have altered the disparities in home values between Black and White homeowners. We find that air quality capitalization rates are significantly lower for Black homeowners. In fact, they are so much lower...

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...

Every month, a fraction of UK property leases are extended for another 90 years or more. We use new data on thousands of these natural experiments from 2003 onwards to estimate the "natural rate of return on capital", \(r_K^\text{*}\), which also represents the long-run dividend-price ratio....

We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past 25 years and a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the 1980s and 1990s. We impute the aggregate...

This paper surveys and interprets a wide body of literature on the taxation and subsidization of investment in owner-occupied and rental housing. Where available, the study considers experiences outside of the United States. Issues addressed include what nonneutral taxation is, how...

The racial gap in the value of owner occupied housing has narrowed substantially since 1940, but this narrowing has not been even over time or across space. The 1970s stand out as an unusual decade in which the value gap did not narrow despite continued convergence in the observed...

The historical evolution of racial differences in income in the 20th century United States has been examined intensively by economists, but the evolution of racial differences in wealth has been examined far less. This paper uses IPUMS data to study trends in racial differences in home ownership...

Home equity conversion as presently constituted or proposed usually does not deal well with the potential problem of moral hazard. Once home-owners know that the risk of poor market performance of their homes is borne by investors, they have an incentive to neglect to take steps to maintain the...