We examine two factors that might explain the extent of air traffic delays in the United States: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. Airline hubs enable passengers to cross-connect to many destinations, thus creating network benefits that increase in the number of...

A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as publicly provided or subsidized low- income housing is that it has a real effect on recipients’ outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of public or subsidized housing -- does it increase the housing stock? If...

The tax subsidy to owner-occupied housing significantly impacts families’ decisions to move. When the subsidy is reduced, renters considerably delay their transition to homeownership and homeowners may be slightly less likely to trade up to a larger house. Higher capital gains tax rates...

Using data from the 1986 through 1997 period, we update the time series evidence on the response of capital gains realizations to tax rates. <p> We find higher long-run elasticities than reported in many previous studies, but the estimates decrease substantially when the influence of 1986 is...</p>

Using 1990 Census tract-level data, we estimate how tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing are distributed spatially across the United States, calculating their value as the difference in taxes currently paid by home owners and the taxes owners would pay if there were no preference for...

The real options framework has been used to characterize the timing of irreversible investment in the presence of uncertainty. Despite a well developed theoretical literature, there are few empirical studies that use investment level data to examine the link between real options theory and...

We show that loss aversion is an important feature in explaining sellers’ behavior in the housing market. Data from the 1990-97 boom-bust cycle in downtown Boston show that condominium owners subject to nominal losses 1) set higher asking prices of 25-35 percent of the difference between the...