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...

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...

Hong Kong introduced a Tobin property tax—the Special Stamp Duty (SSD) Policy—in 2010, which substantially increased the selling costs of short-term property holders. This study examines the effectiveness of this Tobin property tax in curbing speculation and cooling down the market. We find...

This study investigates the existence of political rents in bank lending, using a comprehensive loan-level data set of the universe of commercial loans in Mexico from 2003 to 2012. Identification relies on changes in the state of origin of a senate committee chairman as a source of exogenous...

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...

We study how funding dynamics in a crowdfunding market affect capital users who seek to minimize underfunding risk. Our model shows that entrepreneurs benefit from market transparency if the information on the project is sufficiently heterogeneous or the entrepreneur is not too averse to funding...

Buyers’ onsite viewing activities reveal important information about their housing demands, yet empirically we know little about their impact on transaction outcomes. Using a unique proprietary dataset which includes 4,397,652 onsite viewing records and 621,040 transaction outcomes from the...

Real estate developers face significant risks in managing new developments, and presale contracts are commonly used to shift these risks to buyers. We develop a theoretical model to show that presale prices are an increasing function of time and that earlier presales are associated with greater...

This paper examines the effect of mainland Chinese buyers' housing purchase in Hong Kong. Contrary to media's allegation on mainland buyers causing huge bubbles in Hong Kong housing market, we find that mainland buyers only constitute less than 4% of housing transactions in Hong Kong from 2001...