In the last few decades, U.S. financial markets have witnessed a dramatic increase in the sophistication and size of the secondary market for mortgage loans. By 2002, close to 90 percent of conforming mortgage loan originations in the U.S. were sold into the secondary market. Although there is...

Housing policy under the Clinton and Bush Administrations has sought to boost homeownership while also narrowing racial gaps in owner-occupancy rates. Against that backdrop, homeownership rose sharply in the 1990s, but white-minority gaps remain in excess of 25 percentage points. We analyze...

Appropriately constructed measures of the quality of life and the quality of the business environment should be important determinants of the growth and composition of population across urban areas. This paper examines that question by extending theoretical measures of household quality of life...

This paper develops a new measure of "quality of the business environment" that complements existing measures of "quality of life". An annual panel of these measures is constructed and analyzed for 37 cities from 1977 to 1995. Findings indicate that many cities attractive to firms are...

This paper provides the first application of the compensating differential paradigm to the evaluation of the extent and sources of evolution in state quality-of-life. The compensating differentials approach derives from early work by Rosen (1979) and Roback (1982), who showed how to extract...

New intermetropolitan and time-series data from the BLS are used to derive and modelthe incidence and the duration of rental vacancies and to assess the importance of thoseindicators to the price adjustment mechanism for rental housing. Research findings indicatethat the duration of vacancy...

In a paper published in The Review of Economics and Statistics some 20 years ago, we sought to assess the disparate residential location choices of black and white households in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area (Gabriel and Rosenthal [1989]). The paper showed that simulated closure of...

Recent studies have documented substantially depressed levels of homeownership among African-American households. While prior analyses have focused largely on racial disparities in household financial characteristics, few studies have assessed the potential role of location choice and locational...

This study evaluates the effects of GSE mortgage purchase activity on homeownership and housingconditions among communities that are the focus of the 1992 GSE Act and the HUD affordablehousing goals. To identify GSE effects, the test framework exploits differences in the definition...

Recent years have witnessed significant evolution in the structure and organization of China’s labor markets. While the majority of workers remain employed in public work units (state-owned enterprises and urban collectives), private sector employment in China hasexpanded significantly....