This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific...

The authors construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity....

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population...

We provide new evidence from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census of Housing that the expenditure share on housing is constant over time and across U.S. metropolitan areas (MSA). Consistent with this observation, we consider a basic model in which identical households with Cobb-Douglas...

Researchers and policy makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic model of optimal location choice, we estimate preferences over neighborhoods of likely...

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of default risk for newly originated home purchase loans since 1990. We bring together several data sources to produce this history, including loan-level data for the entire GSE book. We use these data to track a large number of loan...

We use new property-level data to estimate the price of land from 2000 to 2013 for nearly the universe of detached single-family homes in the Washington, DC metro area and characterize the housing boom-bust cycle in land and house prices at a fine geography. The data show that land prices were...

Our analysis produces three main findings for our sample: land prices in most areas increased between 2012 and 2017, land prices tended to rise faster than house prices, and land appreciated most rapidly in areas with relatively high density of structures.

In this paper, the authors exploit the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA's) surprise 50 basis point cut to its annual mortgage insurance premium in January 2015 to study the impact of federal housing policy and interest rates on housing demand for a population of households likely to be...

In this paper, we use a new property-level dataset to estimate the price of land since 2000 for nearly 600,000 detached single-family homes in the Washington, DC metro area. We employ these estimates to characterize the recent boom/bust cycle in land prices and house prices in the Washington...