The most significant U.S. housing subsidy programs are funded by tax expenditures through the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). Beyond the subsidy to homeownership provided to all owner occupants through the personal income tax, the IRC provides additional subsidies to specific groups of homeowners....

This paper develops a model of price formation in the housing market which accounts for non-random selection of those dwellings sold on the market from the stock of existing houses. The model also accounts for changes in the quality of dwellings themselves and tests for mean reversion in...

Research on climate change suggests that small improvements in the "sustainability" of buildings can have large effects on greenhouse gas emissions and on energy efficiency in the economy. This paper analyzes the economics of "green" building. First, we analyze a panel of office buildings...

Many social scientists presume that the quality of the neigborhood to which children are exposed affects a variety of long-run social outcomes. I examine the effect on the long-run labor market outcomes of adults who were assigned, when young, to substantially different public housing projects...

It is generally conceded that dividend pricing models are poor predictors of asset prices. This finding is sometimes attributed to excess volatility or to a dividend process manipulated by firm managers. In this paper, we present rather powerful panel tests of the dividend pricing relation using...

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area’s heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of...

This paper provides a survey of federal housing programs, establishing the primary importance of indirect and off-budget activities in promoting housing and providing subsidies to housing consumers. We consider the role of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) and the...

Standard economic theory on subsidies and labor supply raises an unappetizing prospect - that housing assistance may have a negative impact on self-sufficiency. Because of the rent structure in the public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs, participants may treat program benefits as a...

During the past 15 years, Swedish higher education policy has emphasized the spatial decentralization of post-secondary education. We investigate the economic effects of this decentralization policy on productivity and output per worker. We rely upon a 14-year panel of output and employment for...