This paper investigates the effects of subsidies on the investment decisions of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We use survey information on firms' subjective evaluations of the investment they would have undertaken without financing, finding that subsidies have limited effectiveness as...

Standard intuition suggests that residential segregation in the United States will decline when racial inequality narrows. In this paper, we hypothesize that the opposite will occur. We note that middle-class black neighborhoods are in short supply in many U.S. metropolitan areas, forcing highly...

Combining data from several sources, we build a database of home values, the cost of housing structures, and residential land values for 46 large U.S. metropolitan areas from 1984 to 2004. Our analysis of these new data reveal that since the mid-1980s residential land values have appreciated...

We combine publicly available data from Freddie Mac, the Decennial Census of Housing, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to construct the first constant-quality aggregate price index for the stock of residential land in the United States. We uncover five main results: (a) since 1970,...

The terms of reference for the inquiry on First Home Ownership asked the Commission to evaluate the affordability and availability of housing for first home buyers.The Commission's preliminary findings were released for public comment in December.In its final assessment, the Commission...

This paper presents a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made between initial listing and sale agreement. We establish a number of stylized facts pertaining to the...

This study examines the pricing of high-LTV debt to determine whether state-specific default laws have an impact on the availability and cost of that debt. We develop a simple theoretical model that provides predictions concerning borrower and lender choice of mortgage terms under differing...

Cross sectional spatial models frequently contain a spatial lag of the dependent variable as a regressor, or a disturbance term which is spatially autoregressive. In this paper we describe a computationally simple procedure for estimating cross sectional models which contain both of these...

This paper considers the use of legal liability as a toolfor internalizing environmental externalities, consideringspecifically the implications for land markets. Thediscussion focuses on liability under CERCLA. A simplemodel of land markets is used to evaluate alternativeassignments of...

The spatial mismatch hypothesis, first stated by Kain (1968), argues that job decentralization in U.S. cities has contributed to low incomes and high unemployment rates for black Americans. Decentralization relocates job sites to white suburban communities far from the CBD, and housing...