Does America face an affordable housing crisis and, if so, why? This paper argues that in much of America the price of housing is quite close to the marginal, physical costs of new construction. The price of housing is significantly higher than construction costs only in a limited number of...

Our data show that land prices were more volatile than house prices during the recent boom/bust cycle. In areas where land was inexpensive in 2000, the land share of property value jumped during the boom, and this rise in the land share was a useful predictor of the subsequent crash in house...

We derive and discuss a general, but simple geographical economics model with congestion, allowing us to explain the economic viability of small and large locations. The model generalizes some previous work and lends itself to analyzing the impact of public policy in terms of infrastructure...

The past decades have shown a remarkable growth in entrepreneurship among migrants. Recent studies on ethnic entrepreneurship have pointed at an increasing share of migrants in urban small- and medium-sized entrepreneurial businesses. These migrant activities are crucial to the urban economy in...

This paper focuses on residential sorting by social and ethnic status in large French urban areas. Our objective is to assess the relative importance of two major determinants of segregation stressed by the economic literature (Bartolome and Ross, 2003 ; Brueckner et al., 1999) : (i) “Alonso...

Though Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama put forth several different mortgage modification programs, the rate of foreclosures has continued to rise over the past several years. According to CoreLogic, about one-in-four (23%) mortgages were underwater in the second quarter of 2010, and...

The recent literature on tenure choice has been focusing increasingly on the information aspects of the tenure choice dec ision. However, despite the obvious information channel between social networks and tenure choice, the relationship has drawn little attention in academic research. Since the...

Social attitudes (beliefs) are increasingly being recognized as factors that are important in determination of the outcomes that interests economists. In the United States as Glaeser and Ward (2006) have shown, the differences in beliefs on social issues such as acceptability of legal abortion...

The influence of social networks on housing tenure choice remains conspicuously unexplored despite the fact that soci al networks are crucial in information dissemination. Social networks can enco urage the attainment and retention of homeownership by channeling important knowledge and...

This report describes the migration patterns of Romanian migrants in Italy before and after the accession of Romania into the European Union (EU). The findings and the main results presented throughout the report were collected by carrying out a survey in three main cities of Italy Milan, Turin...