While prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of...

Questionnaire surveys undertaken in 1988 and annually from 2003 through 2014 of recent homebuyers in each of four U.S. metropolitan areas shed light on their expectations and reasons for buying during the recent housing boom and subsequent collapse. They also provide insight into the reasons for...

The boom and bust in housing during the 2000s has led to renewed interest in the boom and bust in housing between 1920 and 1940. The most commonly used housing value series for this period is reported by Robert Shiller in Irrational Exuberance. We investigate the changes in housing values in...

This paper presents new empirical evidence that internal movement - selling one home and buying another - by existing homeowners within a metropolitan housing market is especially volatile and the main driver of fluctuations in transaction volume over the housing market cycle. We develop a...

A ubiquitous and largely unquestioned assumption in studies of housing markets is that there is perfect information about local amenities. This paper measures the housing market and health impacts of 1,600 openings and closings of industrial plants that emit toxic pollutants. We find that...

This paper analyzes the importance of household perceptions of house price risk in explaining homeownership choice. While a majority of US households (71%) believes that housing is a “safe” investment, renters are much more likely to perceive housing as risky. Risk perceptions vary across...

Using loan-level mortgage data merged with consumer credit records, we examine the ability of the government to impact mortgage refinancing activity and spur consumption by focusing on the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). The policy relaxed housing equity constraints by extending...

We construct housing price indices for 120 major cities in China in 2003-2013 based on sequential sales of new homes within the same housing developments. By using these indices and detailed information on mortgage borrowers across these cities, we find enormous housing price appreciation during...

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....