This paper investigates whether individuals' cultural background affects their housing investment decisions, drawing inferences from property location choices and transaction prices in Australia. We propose a novel measure of cultural distance for each homebuyer-neighborhood pair, adopting the...

Startup lawyering is a distinctive style of law practice first observed in Silicon Valley decades ago. Like other business lawyers, startup lawyers form entities, protect intellectual property rights, and document financing transactions for clients starting new businesses. But startup lawyers...

We examine whether the recent behavior of real estate investors had an effect on housing affordability between 2007 and 2014. We analyze investors' purchasing and selling behavior and study their spillover effects on the affordability of the local real estate market where they invest. We find...

Ahmedabad is often called an Indian ‘success story' in terms of economic urbanization, but it is also a city highly segregated along religious and caste lines, and a flashpoint in the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots that left thousands dead. Most of the Muslim communities relocated after the...

In the wake of the housing market crash in the United States in the late 2000s, images of abandoned homes on the urban periphery of American cities dominated international media coverage. This narrative of peri-urban over-extension was used by media documenting the housing crisis in Mexico,...

This paper examines whether and how street name fluency affects housing prices using a rich sample of housing transactions in Sydney, Australia. We find street names with longer words are preferred, i.e., homes on street names with more letters are priced with a 0.6% premium. Homes with unique...

This article considers the future of financialisation as it is entwined with that of cities. It poses the question of how cities can regulate financialisation. ‘Financialization’ is understood here to encompass the myriad of social, economic, legal and political dimensions of the transition...

This paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication of this view is that squatters quot;squeezequot; the formal market, raising the price paid by formal residents. The...