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Journal Article
Housing Affordability and Housing Demand
Understanding housing demand dynamics through two indicators, income growth and population growth, provides important insights into housing affordability. Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas. Instead, greater population growth translates into greater housing supply growth, with housing supply generally outpacing population, even in expensive markets. Thus, differences in affordability across areas may reflect differences in the growth and type ...
Journal Article
Credit Conditions in the Pandemic Mortgage Market
The recent rapid rise in house prices has raised some questions about the potential risk to broader financial stability. However, credit quality in the mortgage market appears to be very high, and lending standards tightened in early 2020. While low interest rates increased the demand for refinancing, evidence from large nonconforming loans shows that credit supply contracted sharply in March 2020 and remained tight through the early pandemic period. The shift in credit supply suggests that lenders adjusted their standards to mitigate some risk in the housing market.
Journal Article
Remote Work and Housing Demand
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the way households work. Nearly a third of employees still worked from home part time or full time as of August 2022. This has significantly increased housing demand and is a key factor explaining why U.S. house prices grew 24% between November 2019 and November 2021. Analysis shows that the shift to remote work may account for more than half of overall house price increases and similar increases in rents. This fundamental evolution in work-related housing demand may be important for future house prices.
Journal Article
Passing Along Housing Wealth from Parents to Children
Young adults are more likely to own a home if their parents are homeowners than if their parents are renters. New research reveals how parents owning a home can lead to an increase in the persistence in homeownership across generations. Specifically, homeowner parents are often able to extract the equity value from their home to help their children purchase a home. This “dynastic” home equity enables children of homeowner parents who extract equity to accumulate approximately one third more housing wealth by age 30 than children of renters.
Journal Article
Where Is Shelter Inflation Headed?
Shelter inflation has remained high even as other components of inflation have fallen. However, various market indicators, including house prices and rents, suggest that the housing market has slowed significantly with the rise in interest rates. Forecasting models that combine several measures of local shelter and rent inflation can help explain how recent trends might affect the path of future shelter inflation. The models indicate that shelter inflation is likely to slow significantly over the next 18 months, consistent with the evolving effects of interest rate hikes on housing markets.
Journal Article
Pandemic-Era Demand Squeezed Housing Inventories
The housing market experienced historically low levels of inventory along with rapid price growth in the two years following the onset of the pandemic. Analysis of national and county-level housing data suggests this price surge was fueled by heightened demand rather than low supply. The inflow of new listings remained at pre-pandemic levels, but the outflow due to sales was unusually high, which fed into the low inventory. By mid-2022, rising mortgage rates moderated demand, allowing inventory levels to return to pre-pandemic trends.
Working Paper
Real Effects of Nominal Interest Rates
Nominal interest rates have real effects. Residential mortgages and other real world debt contracts require a sequence of constant nominal payments. Combined with payment-to-income constraints, these nominal payments force borrowers to take on less debt when nominal interest rates rise, regardless of the behavior of the real interest rate. Survey data shows that conditional on the real rate, higher nominal mortgage interest rates reduce home buying sentiment. And increases in nominal mortgage rates reduce mortgage origination more in cities where payment to-income constraints are more likely ...
Working Paper
Quality, Inequality and Understanding Housing Markets
Most housing research relies on a single-margin model where a single housing price relates to a single housing quantity. We generalize this approach by introducing income inequality and housing quality. Two important challenges to studying housing supply (and demand) emerge: First, there is no singular housing supply function, instead there is a continuum of unit-supply functions indexed by quality. This implies that supply elasticity estimates are local average treatment effects (LATEs), not structural elasticities. Second, spillovers common in spatial settings may preclude even the LATE ...
Working Paper
Does Greater Inequality Lead to More Household Borrowing? New Evidence from Household Data
Using household-level debt data over 2000-2012 and local variation in inequality, we show that low-income households in high-inequality regions (zip-codes, counties, states) accumulated less debt (relative to their income) than low-income households in lower-inequality regions, contrary to the prevailing view. Furthermore, the price of credit is higher and access to credit is harder for low-income households in high-inequality versus low-inequality regions. Lower quantities combined with higher prices suggest that the debt accumulation pattern by household income across areas with different ...
Working Paper
Housing Demand and Remote Work
What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. This cross-sectional estimate combined with the aggregate shift to remote work implies that remote work raised aggregate U.S. house prices by 15.1 percent. Using a model ...