This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets...

This paper describes six stylized patterns among housing markets in the United States that potential explanations of the housing boom and bust should seek to explain. First, individual housing markets in the U.S. experienced considerable heterogeneity in the amplitudes of their cycles. Second,...

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the...

We draw on household-level data from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze how changes in the income tax deduction for mortgage interest would affect the distribution of income tax liabilities and the consumption of housing services. Our primary innovation is to focus on the responses...

A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as publicly provided or subsidized low- income housing is that it has a real effect on recipients’ outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of public or subsidized housing -- does it increase the housing stock? If...

The tax subsidy to owner-occupied housing significantly impacts families’ decisions to move. When the subsidy is reduced, renters considerably delay their transition to homeownership and homeowners may be slightly less likely to trade up to a larger house. Higher capital gains tax rates...

Using data from the 1986 through 1997 period, we update the time series evidence on the response of capital gains realizations to tax rates. <p> We find higher long-run elasticities than reported in many previous studies, but the estimates decrease substantially when the influence of 1986 is...</p>

We examine two factors that might explain the extent of air traffic delays in the United States: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. Airline hubs enable passengers to cross-connect to many destinations, thus creating network benefits that increase in the number of...