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Working Paper
Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances
This paper tests the effectiveness of vacant property registration ordinances (VPROs) in reducing negative externalities from foreclosures. VPROs were widely adopted by local governments across the United States during the foreclosure crisis and facilitated the monitoring and enforcement of existing property maintenance laws. We implement a border discontinuity design combined with a triple-difference specification to overcome policy endogeneity concerns, and we find that the enactment of VPROs in Florida more than halved the negative externality from foreclosure. This finding is robust to a ...
Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Dallas Conference Explored Housing, Urban Economics
Residential real estate prices rose sharply throughout the United States following the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. While property owners received a capital gains windfall, first-time buyers and renters have struggled with reduced affordability.
Working Paper
The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: Estimating Agent Value-Added Using Real Estate Transactions
Despite the prevalence and high cost of real estate agents, there is limited empirical evidence as to the nature or efficacy of their services. In this paper we estimate real estate agents’ value-added when either selling or buying homes using data from three large multiple listing services (MLS). We find that homeowners who forgo a conventional real estate agent, but who list their homes on the MLS via a flat fee broker, sell for between 1 and 4 percent more before commission but take longer to sell and are less likely to complete a sale. However, these average effects mask a significant ...
Working Paper
Voters hold the key: lock-in, mobility, and the portability of property tax exemptions
Since California voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978, fifteen states have enacted caps on the annual growth in assessed property values. These laws often impose a great burden on municipal finances and create horizontal inequity among homeowners. Why do voters choose to limit local government in this way? Reasons may include controlling the power of special interests, addressing agency failures of government officials (the "Leviathan" hypothesis), or preserving the impact of a current but fleeting antitax political alignment. Yet research has found that voters' perception of a ...
Journal Article
Clearing the roadways: the case for congestion pricing
COVID-19 Mortgage Relief—The Role of Income Support
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a large number of furloughs, layoffs, reductions in hours worked, and wage cuts. Anticipating that many homeowners would consequently have problems paying their monthly mortgage bill, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered all mortgage servicers of federally backed debt to provide forbearance to any homeowners affected by the crisis. In addition, bank regulators encouraged lenders to forbear and restructure mortgages for borrowers affected by the shutdown, actions that staved off an immediate wave of foreclosures. At the end of the ...
Journal Article
Work zone ahead? Repairing the Southeast's infrastructure
The Southeast's infrastructure, which sustains the region's fast-growing population and dynamic economy, faces the challenge of meeting today's needs as well as those accompanying future growth.
Working Paper
Household Debt and Local Public Finances
In the wake of the Great Recession, steep declines in state and local government expenditures and employment were a large and persistent source of economic weakness. The business cycle was also characterized by large increases and decreases in household debt. We estimate the extent to which variation in local government revenues and expenditures can be explained by variation in the expansion of household debt from 2002 to 2007, and the contraction thereafter. We merge individual credit balance data with municipal financial data from the Census of Governments. Using Census block indicators, we ...
Journal Article
How Long Does It Take to Build Multifamily Housing?
Increasing the supply of multifamily housing is a key strategy to reduce the cost of shelter in our larger cities. However, the time required to produce these units has grown over time. We document the duration from when an apartment or condominium development or redevelopment (i.e., conversion from another use) is first announced until its completion. We break down this duration into (a) the planning and permitting phase and (b) the construction phase. We find that, on average, projects spend three to four months more in the planning stage than in construction. This project duration is ...