The United States labor market has become less dynamic over the past three decades. This paper explores the contribution of housing market regulation towards these declines. First, a 1sd rise in housing market regulation is associated with a 0.11-0.22sd decline in the turnover rate. Second,...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

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...

User costs of housing are a major part of a household’s expenditure.I empirically investigate the heterogeneous impact of an unanticipatedexpansionary monetary policy on housing markets and householdtenurial decision by exploiting the user cost of housing channel.Drawing on a Swiss household...

Many of the world's major cities have attracted a flurry of out-of-town (OOT) home buyers. Such capital inflows affect house prices, rents, construction, labor income, wealth, and ultimately welfare. We develop an equilibrium model, calibrated to the typical U.S. metropolitan area, to quantify...

This paper quantitatively accounts for the cyclical dynamics of key macroeconomic housing and mortgage market variables using a tractable, searchtheoretic model of housing with equilibrium mortgage default. To explain these dynamics, the model highlights the importance of liquidity spirals that...

Studies of foreclosure externalities have overwhelmingly focused on the impact of forced sales on the value of nearby properties, typically finding modest evidence of foreclosure spillovers. However, many quality-of-life issues posed by foreclosures may not be reflected in nearby sale prices....

Building on Flavin and Nakagawa (2008), this paper models household optimal consumption and portfolio selection when consumption services are generated by both non-durable consumption and by holding a durable good housing. Housing is illiquid in that a non-convex adjustment cost must be paid...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of search risk in the housing market. To do so, I introduce a tractable directed search model of housing with multidimensional buyer and seller heterogeneity. I incorporate this framework in an incomplete markets macroeconomic model with...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...