{"title":"Fairness of the first-come, first-served rule on the rental housing market: Insights from a hypothetical survey experiment","authors":"Mathieu Bunel , Elisabeth Tovar","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Echoing recent policies implemented in Seattle and Portland, we examine perceptions of the fairness of the first-come, first-served (FCFS) rule in the context of discrimination in the rental housing market. To do so, we use an original hypothetical survey experiment in which a rental agent is confronted with the discriminatory preferences of his landlord customers. A sample of 2,835 respondents representative of the US population was asked about which choice was the best, from a moral point of view: to allocate rental units exclusively to whichever group applied first (FCFS rule), to the other group or 50/50 to both groups. In two separate experiments, we manipulated (i) the order of arrival of the discriminated and non-discriminated groups, (ii) the income impact of implementing the FCFS rule for the rental agent, who risks losing landlord customers if they rent to the discriminated group, (iii) peer effects, i.e., what other rental agents do and (iv) social norms shared by all members of the community. Consistent with the literature, we find that the order of tenant arrival affects respondents’ normative preferences, and that, second to the 50/50 rule, the FCFS rule is well-received by respondents. Additionally, income, peer influence and social norms all causally impact the level of support for the FCFS rule among respondents. Finally, respondents who are more likely to experience economic hardship and belong to the dominant group in their neighbourhood are the least likely to support the FCFS rule.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"65 ","pages":"Article 102004"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000238/pdfft?md5=8612a5836a66325f8cd8020a528b311c&pid=1-s2.0-S1051137724000238-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141403563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How supply and demand affect national house prices: The case of Ireland","authors":"Paul Egan, Kieran McQuinn, Conor O'Toole","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While many western economies experienced substantial fluctuations in house prices since the turning of the century, the Irish residential market stands out as a particular case. Irish house prices experienced profound increases in the period leading up to the global financial crisis (GFC); thereafter the concomitant downturn in both the real Irish economy and financial sector precipitated a dramatic decline in prices between 2007 and 2012. However, since 2012 prices have increased in a sustained and persistent manner. A number of possible reasons are commonly cited for the recovery. In this paper we avail of a new housing and financial sector model, which are part of a broader macro-econometric model, COSMO, of the Irish economy to characterise the determinants of Irish house prices over the period 1995–2019 and in particular to examine the reasons for the post 2012 recovery. The suite of models are used to examine the contribution of developments in both monetary policy and financial stability as well as the performance of the real economy. The role played by the sluggish response of the supply-side of the Irish residential sector is also assessed. The supply-side of the Irish market was especially impacted by the GFC and has struggled to respond to the surge in housing demand which has accompanied the general economic recovery since 2012. Our results have interesting implications for the growing literature examining the intersection of monetary policy and financial stability on house prices.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"65 ","pages":"Article 102006"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141428935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The price of short-term housing: A study of Airbnb on 26 regions in the United States","authors":"Wenzhen Lin , Fan Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.102005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study investigates the influence of customer review content and other attributes on Airbnb listing prices, using data from listings across 26 U.S. regions. By integrating sentiment analysis and topic modeling with hedonic and quantile regression models, this paper examines the significant role of electronic word-of-mouth in the short-term rental market, by studying how review sentiments and topics affect pricing strategies. The findings reveal that negative reviews have twice the impact on listing prices as positive reviews; and fourfold for lower-priced listings. Moreover, the results of topic modeling show that both positive and negative reviews related to facilities and location have a larger impact on listing prices. Additionally, the study looks at how the distance of listings from the city center and the timing of reviews affect pricing adjustments. The influence of reviews diminishes for listings located farther from the city center, indicating that Airbnb listing prices near the city center are more sensitive to changes in price determinants. The study also uncovers the existence of a lag effect in how reviews impact prices, showing that Airbnb hosts may not adjust prices as quickly as hotel owners. Overall, the study enriches existing literature by taking into account the review content and type of customer reviews, offering a more comprehensive understanding of short-term rental pricing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"65 ","pages":"Article 102005"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141313814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seller and search behavior in the Belgian housing market","authors":"Joren Vandenbergh","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101997","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper analyzes online real estate listings to estimate the listing price elasticity of search activity for the individual seller for both the rental and sales market. This elasticity is an essential parameter in the literature modeling the process of selling a home, as it indicates the extend to which potential buyers will react to the listing price. Furthermore, we argue that our estimates are an approximation for the average price elasticity of demand facing the individual seller, which is an indication for the amount of competition in the market. A novel dataset tracking real estate advertisements on a daily basis allows to control for unobserved heterogeneity between properties by using property fixed effects, exploiting the variation caused by changes in listing prices and search behavior throughout the listing process. The findings indicate that a one percent increase in the listing price reduces search activity for the property by 6.7 percent for the sales market and 6.6 percent for the rental market. Additionally, we find that an increase in the number of listings in a market segment enhances the listing price elasticity.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101997"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140947511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Homeownership, the unemployed and financial hardship","authors":"Riccardo Welters , Ruud Gerards , Kyran Mellor","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101996","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101996","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We follow 3,826 Australian unemployed persons, approximately half of whom are homeowners. We conduct a matching analysis and find that homeownership reduces both experienced and perceived financial hardship. Building on recent findings in the literature that the presence of financial hardship deteriorates job search quality (i.e., stressors like financial hardship lead to the adoption of haphazard rather than focused job search strategies), we introduce financial hardship as a novel channel through which homeownership affects labour market outcomes of the unemployed. In our matching analysis, we include historical labour market performance and personality traits linked to mobility preferences, to address endogeneity. We also confirm that homeownership reduces residential mobility and increases neighbourhood social capital but find no effect on reservation wages of the unemployed. Considering declining homeownership rates across the OECD in recent years, our findings are both timely and imperative to understand the effect of homeownership on labour market outcomes of the unemployed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101996"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000159/pdfft?md5=c134cb74b21bcba8f58df2fb4e73df0a&pid=1-s2.0-S1051137724000159-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140786437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The impact of a macroprudential borrower-based measure on households’ leverage and housing choices","authors":"Daniel Abreu , Sónia Félix , Vitor Oliveira , Fátima Silva","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101995","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper investigates the impact of changes in lending limits on household leverage and housing choices. Using credit registry data and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy we determine how a change in the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio - a macroprudential policy tool - affected constrained households. Our results show that the policy change was effective in reducing households' leverage as constrained households took out smaller loans and had lower loan-to-income ratios. Such households also paid higher interest rate spreads and had higher loan-service-to-income ratios than the control group. Finally, we also show that the policy change affected households' housing choices, as constrained households bought less expensive houses. Our results highlight the improvement of the risk profile of households following the introduction of the LTV limits.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101995"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140646116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stuart Donovan , Thomas de Graaff , Henri L.F. de Groot , Aaron Schiff
{"title":"An urban overhead? Crime, agglomeration, and amenity","authors":"Stuart Donovan , Thomas de Graaff , Henri L.F. de Groot , Aaron Schiff","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101994","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We study the effects of crime and agglomeration on the value of urban amenities using data for 134 locations in New Zealand and report three key findings. First, the negative effects of crime operate mostly via rents, with elasticities that range from <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.15 to <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.44. Accounting for endogeneity leads to larger elasticities in most specifications, possibly due to sorting effects. Second, crime has negative effects on the value of urban amenities, with elasticities that range from approximately <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.03 to <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.06 for firms and <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.02 to <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.09 for workers. Using reduced-form models, we show that these effects imply an elasticity of population with respect to crime of <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.04 to <span><math><mo>−</mo></math></span>0.10. Third, controlling for crime causes estimates of agglomeration economies to increase by approximately 0.01–0.02 points, on average. Our findings confirm that crime is an important urban congestion cost that erodes productivity and well-being.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101994"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000135/pdfft?md5=2898715169fc78cad01b65139f43c6bd&pid=1-s2.0-S1051137724000135-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140543080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Effect of conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks on housing prices in Canada","authors":"Dennis Nsafoah , Cosmas Dery","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101993","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper investigates the relative importance and effect of conventional and unconventional Canadian monetary policy surprises on housing prices. Using a credible approach to identify structural monetary policy shocks in Canada and a comprehensive Bayesian VAR model to analyze their effects on financial and macroeconomic variables, we find that both conventional monetary policy and quantitative easing shocks have a significant and persistent effect on housing prices in Canada. However, the inflationary effect of a quantitative easing shock is more pronounced than that of an easing target monetary policy surprise. Specifically, the peak effect of a 25-basis point expansionary conventional monetary policy shock is a 2.30% increase in real housing prices while a comparable quantitative easing surprise leads to a peak of 4.56% increase in real housing prices. We conclude that expansionary monetary policy in various forms has had significant inflationary effects on Canadian housing prices. But quantitative easing surprises stand out as the most prominent contributory factor to the escalating Canadian real estate price. Quantitative easing impact consistently outweighs the effects of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy shocks.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101993"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140539891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"COVID-19 vaccination and housing payments","authors":"Yi Zheng , He Ren","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101992","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Using data from the Household Pulse Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we show that COVID-19 vaccination mitigates households’ payment difficulty and that there is a positive causal relationship between the vaccination and housing rent/mortgage payment confidence. We attribute these findings to an economic recovery channel. Specifically, the vaccination results in improvement of economic activities and reduction in job losses and households’ anxiety, worry, and depression. Moreover, our results identify some racial, occupational, and regional disparities. The positive causal relationship between the vaccination and housing payments is more pronounced for black households, self-employed and non-teleworking households, and Southern households.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 101992"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140321003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rent control effects through the lens of empirical research: An almost complete review of the literature","authors":"Konstantin A. Kholodilin","doi":"10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2024.101983","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? To answer this question, we need to identify the effects of rent control. This study reviews a large empirical literature investigating the impact of rent controls on various socioeconomic and demographic aspects. Rent controls appear to be quite effective in terms of slowing the growth of rents paid for dwellings subject to control. However, this policy also leads to a wide range of adverse effects affecting the whole society.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51490,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Housing Economics","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 101983"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020/pdfft?md5=3af3fda2d0e9339e46b0833e1ab65d2a&pid=1-s2.0-S1051137724000020-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139935404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}