A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes...

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

This paper analyzes the role of uncertainty in a multi-sector housing model with financial frictions. We include time varying uncertainty (i.e. risk shocks) in the technology shocks that affect housing production. The analysis demonstrates that risk shocks to the housing production sector are a...

To what degree has the development of alternative mortgage funding channels promoted the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets? Past research examined whether Alt-A and subprime market shares are correlated with the housing bubble. This paper expands the analysis to include the share of...

This paper assesses the effect of Richard Florida's creative class on economic growth and development at two levels of spatial aggregation. First, I examine the dynamics of economic growth across US metropolitan regions and investigate how they relate to regional specialization and the...

Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both...

We use vector error correction models to examine the interdependence between the high and the low price tiers during the latest housing market boom and bust. For 118 of the 364 US statistical areas analyzed, the tiered price indexes are bound by a long-run relationship. In general, low tier...

We test whether foreign demand matters for local house prices in the US using an identification strategy based on the existence of 'home bias abroad' in international real estate markets. Following an extreme political crisis event abroad, a proxy for a strong and exogenous shift in foreign...

Theoretically, if firms face a regulatory per-customer quantity limit, they should have an incentive to discriminatively charge high-demand customers higher prices and make them just willing to buy a quantity equal to the limit. In the U.S. residential mortgage industry, mortgages with...