This paper constructs the first repeat sales house price index in United States history before 1950, using data from Baltimore. It shows that house prices fell more during the 1890s and 1930s than existing data indicate. As a result, while previous data suggest most borrowers should have been...

This paper examines the interwar housing cycle in comparison to what transpired in the United States between 2001 and 2011. The 1920s experienced a boom in construction and prolonged retardation in building in the 1930s, resulting in a swing in residential construction’s share of GDP, and its...

Using new data on market-based transactions we construct real estate price indexes for Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. During the 1920s prices reached their highest level in the third quarter of 1929 before falling by 67 percent at the end of 1932 and hovering around that value for most of the...

The 1920s in the United States were a time of high income and wealth growth and rising inequality, up to the peak in 1929. It was an era of technological innovations such as electrification as well as booms in consumer durables, housing, and asset markets. The degree to which these skill-biased...

We develop a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model of two locations within a city where heterogeneous households make joint location and tenure mode decisions. To investigate the effect of homeownership on equilibrium prices and allocations, we compare the response of this model economy to a...

We show how simple statistical techniques for capturing critical transitions used in natural sciences, fail to capture economic regime shifts. This implies that we need to use model-based approaches to identify critical transitions. We apply a heterogenous agents model in a standard housing...

New Zealand experienced two natural experiments with respect to state-provided social housing after 1990. First, while continuing to acquire new state houses, the National Government substantially reduced the overall state house stock by selling a greater number of houses either to existing...

We study a natural experiment in the Czech Republic where the maximum regulated rent appreciation has depended explicitly on the price of real estate since 2007. We track the tenure choice of households from consumption surveys for subsequent years. Rent deregulation makes households in...