A large share of residential properties on sale in developing countries is under construction. This is partly due to lengthy periods of construction. But purchasing under-construction properties can be costly and risky because of construction delays and the possibility of stalled construction....

Real estate markets in emerging economies are beset with price opacity, low transaction volumes and perverse incentives on tax evasion, leading to acute shortage of reliable price information. In this paper, we overcome the paucity of reliable price information in emerging markets through a...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine whether internet search intensity, as captured by Google’s search volume index (SVI), predicts house price changes in an emerging market like India. Design/methodology/approach: Using data on Google’s SVI for four Indian cities and their...

Ideally land and buildings ought to be preferred collateral for lenders in India, as in many other countries, due to the ease of valuation and disposal of land in the event of default. Data shows that land is a collateral in a large proportion of loans in India, yet the several structural,...

We examine whether internet search intensity, as captured by Google’s Search Volume Index (SVI), predicts house price changes in an emerging market like India. Emerging markets have low internet penetration and high information asymmetry with a dominant unorganized real estate market. Like in...

Prior studies show infrastructural improvements impact property values positively. The effect is often reflected soon after the announcement and continues until the project is complete. These studies, however, are primarily set in developed countries. Emerging markets pose unique risks where...

It is hard to estimate housing supply elasticities. India is a particularly useful country to study housing supply because it is large and has a variety of housing typologies. We estimate the supply elasticity of non-durable, durable, and vacant residential housing units in urban India. We use...

We show that pro-tenant rent control laws increase the rural-urban wage gap by reducing rural-urban migration in India. Migrants are more likely to rent when they move to cities. Rent control laws reduce the supply of rental housing, thereby increasing the costs of migration to cities....

This paper demonstrates that India’s early 2000s mobile phone service expansion, or the “telecom boom” led to net rural-urban migration of about 13 million individuals out of which 4 million moved for employment. To estimate the effects, we exploit the heterogeneous expansion of telecom...