Underlying idiosyncratic and illiquidity risks are suppressed in infrequently reported indexes of house prices and rents. Idiosyncratic risks result from bid-ask spreads for prices and rents. Time series autocovariances generate a distribution of prices and rents. Capital gains and rent-price...

This study investigates the spillover effect of corporate headquarters relocation on the local housing market. Using a comprehensive database to identify corporate relocation events in the U.S. from 1994 to 2017, we show that moving a corporate headquarters into a district is significantly...

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...

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...

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...

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This study documents that over 10% of the presale contracts in the Hong Kong housing market between 1996 and 2014 were rescinded, resulting in a loss of HKD 436.67 million per year. We then investigate potential determinants of contracts rescission from a novel perspective of option theory. We...