Under the stay-at-home orders issued by states, economic activities are reduced or put on hold by some states across the U.S. to control the spread of COVID-19. By combining several sources of data, we estimate the output loss due to such restrictions using a network approach. Based on our most...

This paper shows that monetary policy has uneven impacts on local housing markets, and that the magnitude of the impacts are correlated with housing supply regulations. We apply the linearized present value model, which allows the log rent-price ratio to be decomposed into the expected present...

In this paper we develop a simple model with anchoring and loss aversion to explain house price dynamics. We have two testable implications: 1) when both cognitive biases are present, price dispersion and trade volume are pro-cyclical; 2) if anchoring decreases with time, then price dispersion...

We find that sensitivity of fund flows and fund performance are both related to participants' right to choose their investments in defined contribution plans. Under the Mandatory Provident Fund system of Hong Kong, both employers and employees are required to contribute to a retirement account....

Most DSGE models with a housing market do not explicitly include a rental market and assume a tight mapping between house prices and rents over the business cycle. However, rents are much smoother than house prices in the data. We match this feature of the data by adding both an owner-occupied...

Detecting data manipulation in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) reveals that such cheating behavior has persisted in modern China, for centuries. Qing prefectural officials were responsible for collecting and reporting local grain price data. We use the fact that grain prices are seasonal and grain...

This article explains the rise of Smith’s metaphor near the end of the nineteenth century. I provide evidence that the reappearance was partly triggered by the rise of the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge, as exemplified by a publication by Maitland. Against the backdrop of liberal trade...

We offer an explanation of why changes in house prices are predictable. Extending the static model in Leung and Tsang (2010), we analyze the housing market with loss averse sellers and anchoring buyers in a dynamic setting. A buyer's current offer price increases with the housing unit's previous...

In a simple macro-finance term structure (MFTS) model with macroeconomic variables as risk factors, it matters little whether an econometrician has a strong prior on a particular macroeconomic model. I show in a Monte Carlo experiment that econometricians with drastically different priors will...

Do homeowners prefer living in an area with a more equal distribution of income? We answer this question by estimating a semi-parametric hedonic pricing model for about 90,000 housing units transacted in Hong Kong between 2005 and 2006. We first identify a hedonic price function by locally...