This paper investigates whether individuals' cultural background affects their housing investment decisions, drawing inferences from property location choices and transaction prices in Australia. We propose a novel measure of cultural distance for each homebuyer-neighborhood pair, adopting the...

This paper examines how sentiment affects homebuyers' housing transaction decisions with a focus on auction sales. Utilizing housing transaction data in Sydney from 2000 to 2014, we find that transaction prices are significantly higher for auction sales compared to private sales, consistent with...

Governments utilize home ownership schemes for the dual purpose of alleviating housing affordability and stimulating housing construction. This paper studies how the housing market responds to assistance policies by exploiting a natural experiment in Sydney, Australia, where buyers of new homes...

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented crisis in the tourism industry. We study the impact of COVID-19 on global Airbnb booking activity regarding three factors: the initial Wuhan lockdown, local COVID-19 cases, and local lockdowns. Using reviews and cancellations as proxies for...

How pervasive is the use of cryptocurrencies to evade capital controls? We develop a new method that exploits blockchain data to identify cross-border flows that circumvent controls via cryptocurrencies. Applying the method to China, we find that capital flight volume is over one-quarter of...

This paper examines whether and how street name fluency affects housing prices using a rich sample of housing transactions in Sydney, Australia. We find street names with longer words are preferred, i.e., homes on street names with more letters are priced with a 0.6% premium. Homes with unique...

Using daily hedonic housing price index for five Australian capital cities, we document a negative relationship between prior COVID-19 cases and daily housing returns. Specifically, the daily housing return drops by 0.35 basis points or 1.26 percentage points annually for every doubling of newly...