Search Results
Working Paper
Capitalization as a Two-Part Tariff: The Role of Zoning
This paper shows that the capitalization of local amenities is effectively priced into land via a two-part pricing formula: a ticket" price paid regardless of the amount of housing service consumed and a slope" price paid per unit of services. We first show theoretically how tickets arise as an extensi ve margin price when there are binding constraints on the number of households admitted to a neighborhood. We use a large national dataset of housing transactions, property characte ristics, and neighbor- hood attributes to measure the extent to which local amenities are capitalized in ticket ...
Working Paper
Fast Locations and Slowing Labor Mobility
Declining internal migration in the United States is driven by increasing home attach-ment in locations with initially high rates of population turnover. These ?fast? locations were the population growth destinations of the 20th century, where home attachments were low, but have increased as regional population growth has converged. Using a novel measure of attachment, this paper estimates a structural model of migration that distinguishes moving frictions from home utility. Simulations quantify candidate explanations of the decline. Rising home attachment accounts for most of the decline not ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Travel Behavior in the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic
We use a panel of county-level location data derived from cellular devices in the U.S. to track travel behavior and its relationship with COVID-19 cases in the early stages of the outbreak. We find that travel activity dropped significantly as case counts rose locally. People traveled less overall, and they specifically avoided areas with relatively larger outbreaks, independent of government restrictions on mobility. The drop in activity limited exposure to out-of-county virus cases, which we show was important because such case exposure generated new cases inside a county. This suggests the ...
Journal Article
How Mortgage Lock-In Affects the Price of Housing
There has never been such a huge gap between the rate homeowners pay and the rate for new mortgages.
Journal Article
The Pros and Cons of Housing Market Investors
Are investors bad for the housing market? And if so, how should policymakers address this problem?
Journal Article
Travel Behavior and the Coronavirus Outbreak
Jeffrey Brinkman and Kyle Mangum examine cellphone data from coast to coast to find out how Americans changed their travel behavior in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal Article
No More Californias
As American mobility declines, some wonder if we've lost our pioneer spirit. A closer look at the data suggests that the situation is less dire— and more complicated—than it at first appears.
Working Paper
Banking Regulation with Risk of Sovereign Default
This paper shows the declining trend in internal migration in the United States is primarily due to increasing home attachment in “fast locations,” areas with relatively high rates of population turnover. These locations were population growth destinations in the 20th century, with transient populations that settled as regional population growth converged. The qualitative patterns of the U.S. experience can be generated by a model of location choice in heterogeneous regions with overlapping generations when the population has a home bias that varies endogenously with the history of ...