The social capital literature documents a connection between social connection and economic outcomes of interest ranging from government quality to economic growth. Popular authors suggest that housing and architecture are important determinants of social connection. This paper examines the...

I construct dynamic economic models which focus on an elderly person's decision whether to move in response to changes in his or her health status. The models specify three health states (good, moderately disabled, and poor), three matching housing states (conventional, transitional, and...

We describe a model in which rental and owner housing are risky assets, tenure choice is endogenous, and each household is constrained to consume the same amount of owner housing as it has in its investment portfolio. At each iteration in the search for an equilibrium, we determine the new...

We have described the relationship between family attributes and moving, and between moving and change in housing wealth. Moving is often associated with retirement and with precipitating shocks like the death of a spouse or by other changes in marital status. Median housing wealth increases as...

In many countries of the world the co-residence of young adults aged 25-34 with their parents is not uncommon and in some countries the savings rates of these age groups exceed those of the middle-aged contrary to the standard model of life-cycle savings. In this paper we examine the role of...

By exploiting variation in state capital gains taxation as an instrument, we analyze the economic consequences of housing speculation during the U.S. housing boom in the 2000s. We find that housing speculation, anchored, in part, on extrapolation of past housing price changes, led not only to...

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...

The paper generalizes the Grossman and Laroque (1990) model of optimal consumption and portfolio allocation in the context in which a durable good (or house) subject to adjustment costs is both an argument of the utility function and a component of wealth. Because the Grossman and Laroque model...

Recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investments to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision. This paper investigates the theoretical foundations for this technique. In the context of a novel theoretical model developed to study...

This paper exploits the seasonal and annual changes in marginal prices for water to estimate the price elasticity of demand by residential households for water. It uses the changes in distributions of water using the census block group levels in response to changes in marginal prices of water...