This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets...

We estimate the impact of piped water and sewers on property values in mid-19th century Chicago. The cost of sewer construction depends sensitively on imperceptible variation in grade, and such variations in grade delay water and sewer service to part of the city. This delay provides...

Using three unique micro datasets, we find that an unexpected and unprecedented loosening of China's LTV policy for non-primary houses fueled the entire mortgage boom during 2014Q4-2016Q3. The mortgage expansion disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged homeowners with...

We apply three complementary approaches designed to identify the localized effects of Superfund site remediation under the CERCLA, examining data at the level of (i) the census tract (paying attention to within tract heterogeneity), (ii) the census block, and (iii) individual house transaction....

This paper uses the theories of price discrimination and optimal taxation to investigate effects of underwater mortgages on foreclosures and the incentives to earn income, and the degree to which those effects are shaped by public policy. I find that the federal government's means-tested...

Models used to guide policy, as well as some empirical studies, suggest that the effect of housing wealth on consumption is large and greater than the wealth effect on consumption from stock holdings. Recent theoretical work, in contrast, argues that changes in housing wealth are offset by...

A modest approximation by homebuyers leads house prices to display three features that are present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at five-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals....

We show using a theoretical framework that embeds a voting model in a general-equilibrium model of a rural economy with two interest groups defined by land ownership that the effects of democratization--a shift from control of public resources by the landed elite to a democratic regime with...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...

We develop a dynamic model of international business-to-business transactions in which sellers and buyers search for each other, with the probability of a match depending on both individual and aggregate search effort. Fit to customs records on U.S. apparel imports, the model captures key...