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on Housing and Real Estate |
| By: | Tryg Aanenson; Erik Andres Escayola; Enrique Martínez García; Efthymios Pavlidis; Iván Payá; Kostas Vasilopoulos |
| Abstract: | House prices matter to more than just individual homebuyers and sellers. They are closely tied to consumer spending, business investment and the broader path of the economy. |
| Keywords: | house prices; housing market |
| Date: | 2026–01–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:102544 |
| By: | Enrique Martínez García; Efthymios Pavlidis |
| Abstract: | Survey-based forecast data on home price growth are a surer indicator of housing market exuberance than traditional valuation ratios, such as price-to-income or price-to-rent. |
| Keywords: | housing market; monetary policy |
| Date: | 2025–09–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:101580 |
| By: | Margaret M. Jacobson |
| Abstract: | This paper shows that expected capital gains in several MSAs were higher for relatively lower-priced, rather than higher-priced, houses during the U.S. boom of the 2000s. Because buyers of lower-priced houses tend to be more sensitive to credit conditions than buyers of higher-priced houses, this paper documents patterns that are consistent with an interaction of beliefs and loose credit conditions in a time period where direct evidence on house price beliefs is scarce. Documenting this interaction is important for unifying beliefs and credit conditions as joint, instead of competing, explanations for the U.S. housing boom of the 2000s. |
| Keywords: | real estate market; subprime lending; consumer finance |
| JEL: | D14 D91 R21 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–05–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfe:103195 |
| By: | Luis Lopez; Jackson Owen; Nitzan Tzur-Ilan |
| Abstract: | Wildfire smoke pollution may significantly affect housing market activity in locations hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the fires. |
| Date: | 2024–08–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:98730 |
| By: | Matthew Maltman; Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy |
| Abstract: | This paper studies a sequence of zoning reforms enacted in Lower Hutt, a constituent municipality of the wider Wellington metropolitan region of New Zealand. Beginning in the late 2010s, Lower Hutt independently implemented a sequence of widespread zoning changes to enable medium- and high-density housing in residential areas. Using a synthetic control to specify the policy counterfactual, we find that these zoning changes generated a three-fold increase in consents per capita and nearly tripled the number of housing starts over the six years subsequent to the onset of the reforms. Depending on how potential displacement effects are accounted for, the Lower Hutt reforms increased housing starts across the wider metropolitan region by approximately 10 to 18%. We also present evidence that the upzonings reduced rents by around 21% relative to the counterfactual. |
| Keywords: | Zoning Reform; Upzoning; Housing Supply; Policy Spillovers |
| JEL: | R14 R31 R52 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cyc:wpaper:018 |
| By: | Lauren Spits; Enrique Martínez García |
| Abstract: | A review of market-based and private forecasters’ expectations suggests that U.S. housing may be at an inflection point. U.S. income growth and, more broadly, the robust U.S. labor market will likely help wring out pandemic-era excesses that led to rapidly deteriorating affordability. |
| Keywords: | housing; monetary policy; COVID-19; United States |
| Date: | 2024–08–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:98674 |
| By: | Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy |
| Abstract: | In 2016, Auckland, New Zealand upzoned approximately three-quarters of its residential land, allowing medium and high density housing to be built in areas previously zoned for low density. Permits for the construction of new dwellings subsequently reached record highs. We use a synthetic control method to evaluate the impact of this widespread zoning reform on housing starts. The synthetic control provides an estimate of outcomes under the counterfactual of no zoning reform and implies that the upzoning approximately doubled new dwelling permits per capita within five years of the reform becoming operational. Seven years on from the reform, cumulative permits issued exceed those of the synthetic control by approximately 52, 200, forty-six percent of the 112, 300 permits issued over this period. These findings suggest that zoning reform can be used to redress housing shortages in other jurisdictions. |
| Keywords: | Upzoning; Land Use Regulations; Redevelopment; Housing Starts; Synthetic Controls |
| JEL: | R14 R31 R52 |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cyc:wpaper:017 |
| By: | Arpita Ghosh (University of Exeter); Brendon McConnell (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Jaime Millán-Quijano (Universitat de Barcelona) |
| Date: | 2026–05–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/32 |
| By: | Dulce Lopez Cruz; Teodora Paligorova; Toshihide Yorozu |
| Abstract: | Outstanding mortgage debt in the commercial real estate (CRE) sector totaled $6 trillion at the end of 2024 including owner-occupied and nonowner-occupied real estate, multifamily mortgages, and loans backed by acquisition, development, and construction projects. Banks hold half of all CRE debt, with regional and small institutions (under $100 billion in assets) collectively accounting for a larger share of this lending than their larger counterparts with assets over $100 billion. |
| Date: | 2026–05–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103192 |
| By: | Klooster, Jens van’t; Hochstenbach, Cody |
| Abstract: | Projected climate damage directly threatens present-day asset values, affecting powerful economic constituencies. Yet climate-vulnerable asset (CVA) owners often fail to mobilise for decarbonisation. To analyse the politics of climate adaptation finance, this article develops a macrofinancial framework for understanding socio-economic conflict and asset owner coalitions. Focusing on the highly financialised yet exposed Dutch real estate sector, it analyses how climate change plays out across the consolidated balance sheets of the Dutch housing sector. In the absence of adequate global decarbonisation efforts, building owners have an interest in maintaining stable asset values, while the financial sector prefers better disclosure of risk (which can negatively impact asset values). An incipient coalition of CVA-owners pushes to transfer climate-related losses to the public balance sheet. Asset owners protect their assets, not the planet. |
| JEL: | R14 J01 N0 |
| Date: | 2026–04–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138109 |
| By: | Koppelman, Carter |
| Abstract: | Using gender-targeted housing subsidies, Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program has significantly expanded homeownership among low-income women. However, the latter often face unexpectedly high costs upon becoming homeowners. While existing research shows that burdensome housing costs have adverse socio-economic impacts on beneficiaries of MCMV and similar subsidy programs, this article looks ethnographically at their gendered and disciplinary effects. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in an MCMV-subsidized housing estate in São Paulo, it reveals three effects of cost-burdened homeownership. First, high costs produced deep anxieties and necessitated new budgeting and income-generating practices, augmenting homeowners’ existing burdens of paid and unpaid labor. Second, management of housing costs was experienced as a specifically gendered burden, conferred on women by an avowedly ‘pro-female’ state policy. Third, rather than critique MCMV for imposing high costs, women invoked maternalist state discourses to frame payment as a legitimate obligation that made them respectable citizens and responsible mothers. Bridging the feminist sociology of welfare states with recent work on the disciplinary role of housing policy, this study reveals how programs promoting women’s homeownership can both expand and legitimize unequal gendered burdens. |
| Keywords: | housing costs; homeownership; social housing; citizenship; gender; Brazil |
| JEL: | R21 R38 I38 J16 D12 |
| Date: | 2026–04–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138131 |
| By: | Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy; James Allan Jones |
| Abstract: | We extend the monocentric model to examine the effects of character protections on household welfare. Protections indirectly generate amenity values for residents but require floor area ratio (FAR) restrictions on housing development, presenting a trade-off between welfare-increasing amenities and welfare-decreasing floorspace constraints. Welfare effects become negative when the associated FAR restrictions of character protections are sufficiently tight. This is more likely when protections apply to neighbourhoods that have high demand due to proximity to non-character amenities or employment locations. Calibrating the model to Auckland, we find negative welfare effects, equivalent to a reduction in representative household income of $391 to $1, 375 per year. |
| Keywords: | Character Protections; Land Use Regulations; Redevelopment; House Prices |
| JEL: | R14 R31 R52 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cyc:wpaper:014 |
| By: | J. Scott Davis |
| Abstract: | The ratio of house prices to rents in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since first quarter 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the pandemic. The ratio is near its previous high in 2006. The future course of inflation may well be influenced by how this now-lofty ratio reverts to a more usual level. |
| Keywords: | house prices; rents |
| Date: | 2025–02–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:99637 |
| By: | Alla Semenova |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the growing impacts of climate change in the US homeowner's insurance industry. As climate change-driven weather extremes and natural disasters have accelerated in their frequency and severity, they have inflicted increasingly more residential property damage and destruction, leading to surging losses and claims payouts for the US homeowner's insurance industry. Faced with worsening underwriting performance, the US home insurers have responded with higher homeowner's insurance premiums, reduced home insurance coverage, policy non-renewals, exits from high-risk geographic areas, and other changes to their business practices. Such climate-driven actions by home insurers have led to a crisis of homeowner's insurance affordability, availability, and protection. This crisis further undermines homeownership affordability, eroding homeowner finances, and threatening the stability of the US financial system. By focusing on the US homeowner's insurance industry, this paper provides a case study on the growing economic costs and impacts of climate change. |
| Keywords: | climate change; extreme weather; homeowner’s insurance; home ownership affordability; homeowner finances; financial stability; federal policy |
| JEL: | D14 E31 E44 G01 G21 G22 G28 G51 G52 Q54 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_1115 |
| By: | Ralf R. Meisenzahl; Andy Polacek; Shanthi Ramnath; Zakary Yudhishthu |
| Abstract: | We document that increases in property insurance premiums reduce mortgage originations. The effect is strongest for the rate refinancing and cash-out refinancing segments. We show that denials associated with increased premiums are significantly more likely attributed to high debt-to-income ratios and insufficient collateral. Across the income spectrum, the effect is concentrated among highly levered borrowers. Our results suggest that increases in property insurance premiums could attenuate the refinancing channel of monetary policy as fewer borrowers are able to take advantage of lower rates. |
| Keywords: | Property Insurance; Mortgage market; Refinancing channel |
| JEL: | D12 D14 G21 G52 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedhwp:103254 |
| By: | Anna Tranfaglia; Erin Troland |
| Abstract: | Historic swings in rents during the pandemic have driven increased interest in research on the financial impacts of rising rents on households. However, compared to homeowners with a mortgage, data on renters are scarce, limiting researchers' ability to analyze the 28 percent of adults who rent their home. |
| Date: | 2026–05–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103239 |
| By: | Bloom, Aretousa; Penny, Joe |
| Abstract: | Asset managers, private equity firms and other institutional investors have assumed an increasingly important role in the ownership and management of housing and infrastructure since the Global Financial Crisis. This article analyses how social housing in London is being transformed into a financial asset through an analysis of ‘income strip’ leases, long‐term contractual arrangements between institutional investors and local authorities. Building on insights from urban political economy and the social studies of finance, we explore the moral politics, temporal logics and forms of obligation and risk embedded in these financial arrangements. We situate the rise of income strips within a longer arc of state–market entanglements and argue that they exemplify a recursive and cyclical tendency in the local state's experimentation with private finance. At the level of the contract and the asset, we show how value and risk are distributed and negotiated, and how income strips produce hierarchies of obligation and indebtedness. While institutional investment into social housing is narrated as a ‘common sense’ policy solution that promises to fill the ‘housing gap’ and secure returns for workers’ retirement savings, we show how income strips erode security of tenure, increase rents and entangle states and tenants in new forms of financial obligation, foreclosing alternative political imaginaries. |
| Keywords: | social housing; temporality; asset managers; financialization; risk; obligation |
| JEL: | F3 G3 |
| Date: | 2026–04–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138139 |
| By: | Fernando E. Alvarez; David Argente; Joyce Chow; Diana Van Patten |
| Abstract: | Data centers are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and enterprise software. The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) is intensifying demand for compute, accelerating investment in data centers, and raising concerns about the local economic and environmental footprint of these facilities. Their expansion creates a local policy tradeoff. A data center can bring capital investment, construction activity, and specialized employment, but it can also increase demand for electricity, land, and grid capacity. This paper studies these effects at the U.S. county level. We assemble a facility-level panel of global data centers with precise coordinates, scale metrics, and annualized revenue. We map facilities to U.S. counties and combine them with County Business Patterns, county-level IRS income, county-level house prices, and electricity prices. To address endogenous siting, we instrument for data center growth using two shift-share instruments, which leverage pre-existing proximity to InterTubes long-haul fiber nodes and the 1980 county share of U.S. urban college population as shares, and both Chinese and rest-of-the-world data center revenue growth as shifts. The IV estimates show positive effects on total employment, data-processing employment, construction employment, establishments, house prices, and electricity prices at different horizons after data center growth. We also find positive effects on tax returns, adjusted gross income, and wages, while annual payroll responds less robustly. The results suggest that data centers create measurable local activity, increase house prices, and affect local electricity markets through higher prices. |
| JEL: | D8 O3 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35194 |
| By: | Teresa Lackner (University of Graz, Austria); Stefan Nabernegg (University of Graz, Austria) |
| Abstract: | The decarbonization of the residential building sector requires large upfront investments in heating system replacement and thermal renovation that fall disproportionately on lower-income households. Faced with political constraints on carbon pricing and technology mandates, investment subsidies have become the main policy instrument. This paper analyzes the distributional effects and fiscal costs of this policy approach for Austria. We develop a microsimulation model that links household-level investment needs to landlord wealth distributions, allowing us to assign the incidence of subsidies and financial burden across homeowners and landlords within a unified empirical setting. We find total investment needs amount to 78-92 billion euros over the transition period to 2040 (approximately 1% of GDP annually), implying fiscal costs of 33-40 billion euros under the 2023 subsidy scheme. Despite a targeted low-income component, approximately 45% of subsidy outlays accrue to the top three income deciles. Net investment burdens remain strongly regressive when thermal renovation is required, exceeding three annual incomes for low-income single-family homeowners. We further document substantial horizontal disparities within income groups and show that Austrias fragmented housing law is a first-order determinant of investment feasibility in the multi-apartment (rental) sector. Addressing distributional and feasibility concerns under fiscal constraints may require a policy mix combining mandates, income-contingent transfers, liquidity-support instruments and housing law reform. |
| Keywords: | residential building decarbonization, distributional effects, microsimulation, housing tenure, subsidy incidence, Austria |
| JEL: | H23 Q48 D31 R21 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grz:wpaper:2026-07 |
| By: | David P. Glancy |
| Abstract: | Loan modifications can either amplify or mitigate credit losses depending on the strategy lenders employ. Using detailed supervisory data and a model accounting for competing extension motivations (temporary repayment difficulties, foreclosure costs, and loss recognition costs), I assess why banks extend CRE loans. I find that extensions predominantly address temporary payment frictions, both in normal times and following the Spring 2023 bank stress episode. Contrary to banks "extending-and-pretending" during that episode, banks increased income and principal paydown requirements for extensions, contributing to strong ex-post performance for extended loans. |
| Keywords: | nonresidential real estate; loan delinquency; foreclosures; credit risk; commercial lending |
| JEL: | E44 G21 R33 |
| Date: | 2026–05–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfe:103198 |
| By: | Shan Ge; Stephanie Johnson; Nitzan Tzur-Ilan |
| Abstract: | The rise in homeowners insurance premiums since the pandemic is not just a pricing issue; it is a growing source of financial stress, inequality and geographic sorting. |
| Keywords: | homeowner insurance; mortgages |
| Date: | 2026–03–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:d00001:102962 |