Social scientists studying the disadvantages of poor urban neighborhoods have focused on the quality of publicly provided amenities. However, the quantity and quality of local private amenities, such as grocery stores and restaurants, can also have important quality of life implications for...

The effects of two major demographic forces are traced between 1950 and 2040: the formation and aging of the baby boom generation and the reduction and subsequent return of large-scale immigration. These forces combine to mark several major turning points essential for understanding the changing...

As cities grow, what happens to urban form and how does that changetraffic conditions? How does growing traffic affect urban structure? Thesequestions have received considerable theoretical and empirical attention over thelast 25 years. They relate to the NIMBY debate, which associates most...

Home mortgages have loomed continually larger in the financial situation of American households. In 1949, mortgage debt was equal to 20 percent of total household income; by 1979, it had risen to 46 percent of income; by 2001, 73 percent of income (Bernstein, Boushey and Mishel, 2003). Similarly,...

This study analyzes the impact of contemporaneous loan stress on the termination of loans in the commercial mortgage-backed securities pool using a novel measure, based on changes in net operating incomes and property values at the MSA-property type-year level. Employing a semi-parametric...

This paper argues for the importance of separating the bundled good of housing into land and improvements, because locational amenities – which often constitute a significant portion of property value – are typically capitalized into the value of land but not the value of the...

Not so long ago, the US housing finance system was arguably the best in the world. Consumers had access to products that were not available elsewhere, and the market was able to sustain major economic disruptions with relatively little impact on either the cost or availability of mortgage...

Urban economics and sociology offer many narratives to explain the evolution ofurban America since the Second World War. These stories include the rise and fall ofsegregation, the inexorable march of the middle class to the suburbs, the ¯ltering ofaging housing stock from one class to the...

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...

Despite well-documented shortcomings, hedonic and repeat sales estimators remain the most widely used methods for constructing quality controlled house price indexes and for assessing housing attribute capitalization into dwelling prices. Nonparametric estimators overcome many of the problems...