Real estate markets are periodically plagued by excess supply, rent concessions and few arms-length transactions. During such periods, valuation is problematic. The model presented here requires the forecasts of future vacancy rates, and equilibrium and actual rental rates. Vacancy rate...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on price stickiness by documenting a high rate of nominal rigidity among apartment rents in the U.S. between 1974-1981. 29 percent of units had no change in nominal rent from year to year. Nominal rigidity was much higher among units whose...

We study how the recent run-up in housing and rental prices affects the outlook for inflation in the United States. Housing held down overall inflation in 2021. Despite record growth in private market-based measures of home prices and rents, government measured residential services inflation was...

Digital platforms are not only match-making intermediaries but also establish internal rules that govern all users in their ecosystems. To better understand the governing role of platforms, we study two Airbnb pro-guest rules that pertain to guest and host cancellations, using data on Airbnb and...

This paper uses new household survey data to study expectation formation during the recent housing boom in Germany. The cross section of forecasts depends on only two household characteristics: location and tenure. The average household in a region responds to local conditions but underpredicts...

This paper argues that rental market interactions allow small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production, even when each individual firm would be too small to invest in expensive machines. We conduct a novel survey of manufacturing firms in Uganda, which uncovers an active...

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional...

Simonsohn and Loewenstein (SL 2006) present evidence that a household moving from one US city to another tends to pay a rent level that is closer to the city of origin, relative to comparable locals. Building on "Memory, Attention, and Choice" (BGS 2019), we show that these effects emerge from...

We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing policies. We estimate the model using data collected by the New York Housing...

Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by research showing strong associations between being evicted and subsequent adverse economic outcomes....