The key stylized facts of the housing market are positive serial correlation of price changes at one year frequencies and mean reversion over longer periods, strong persistence in construction, and highly volatile prices and construction levels within markets. We calibrate a dynamic model of...

This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where excess supply might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of China's rapidly...

This paper provides the first theory and evidence on the role of presale policies in the residential housing market. We start with constructing a novel dataset of unfinished projects, presale policies, and land auction outcomes across 270 major cities in China. We then identify 2,330 unfinished...

We develop a framework to estimate the economic value of a recent zoning reform in the city of Sao Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction at the city-block level. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that developers file for more multi-family construction permits...

We advance a novel hypothesis that China's recent anti-corruption campaign may have contributed to the recent resurgence of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China as an unintended consequence. We explore the nexus between the anti-corruption campaign and the SOE resurgence by presenting...

A decentralized market theory of investment based on rising supply price is formulated and explained. Asset prices embody all available information in a competitive market and serve as "sufficient statistics" for future market conditions. Construction is determined myopically by marginal cost...

This study measures the degree to which large public expenditures on wildfire protection subsidize development in harm's way. Using administrative firefighting data, we calculate geographically-differentiated implicit subsidies to homeowners throughout the western USA. We first examine how the...

We report results from a new survey of local residential land use regulatory regimes for over 2,450 primarily suburban communities across the U.S. The most highly regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas being the most highly regulated...

In this chapter, I discuss innovation and entrepreneurship in residential real estate and construction (housing). Based on R&D spending and patent statistics, housing does not appear to be a very innovative sector. But in the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the amount...