Housing costs across the nation and in Greater Boston are rising, and many policymakers have turned to Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) in an attempt to dampen these effects on their lowest-income residents. Yet design and implementation of IZ policy remains haphazard and often is not well-grounded in...

As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for households making less than their region's median income. However, when inclusionary zoning requires...

Urban structures and urban growth rates are highly persistent. This has far-reaching implications for the optimal size and timing of new construction. We prove that rational developers postpone construction not because prospects are gloomy, but because they are bright. The slow mean reversion in...

The owners of undeveloped urban land are often blamed for restricting housing supply and thereby driving up house prices in the face of increasing demand. This paper shows how greater intra-city variation in amenity values reduces competition between developers and makes delaying development...

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

In this paper, we build the rationale of the financial intermediate's decision of making loans to potential home buyers over an infinite time horizon. In the first period "good" borrowers with stable future income flows receive loans and buy homes. In later periods, the intermediate securitizes...

Housing policies in Japan after World War II were focused on the quantitative supply of houses with a wide range of targeted groups and public rental houses. The Japan Housing Corporation (now the Urban Renaissance Agency) and the Government Housing Loan Corporation (now the Japan Housing...

This paper examines whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the housing markets facts, most of all the empirical anomaly known as ‘price dispersion’. Our main finding is that the model can account for the three basic facts of housing market, without any restrictive...

This paper estimates the impact of the murder of film maker Theo vanGogh on November 2, 2004, on listed house prices in Amsterdam with aunique dataset. We use an hedonic-market approach to show that gen-eral attitudes towards Muslim minorities were negatively affected by themurder. Specifically,...

Even though economic models have been relatively successful in explaining the long run patterns of house prices, they have more difficulties in explaining short run developments of the housing markets. However, the fact that during such ‘bubbles’ the spatial pattern of house prices, which...