the demand for housing in sweden equilibrium choice of tenure and type of dwelling abstract most studies of housing demand and tenure choice only identify two modes of tenure owner occupied one family houses and rental apartments furthermore they are typically based on a cross section across all households in this study we use recent swedish data to overcome these weaknesses we identify owner occupied apartments coop shares as a third mode of tenure and show that this should be treated separately we also use information about the household s own assessment of its probability of moving during the next year we demonstrate that it makes a large difference if likely movers are eliminated from the sample

housing choices and uncertainty the impact of stochastic events abstract in our model a household recognizes that family size is stochastic when making its tenure and housing consumption decisions it also recognizes that initial choices constrain later behavior because they affect the amount of savings simulations of the model show that housing consumption and the duration of stay in a residence are sensitive to whether the realization of the stochastic event is the expected value based on this observation we suggest that empirical housing studies should include both the expected and realized values of stochastic explanatory variables we find few behavioral responses to changes in the variance of an uncertain event even though increased uncertainty is passed through to after tax income and the user cost of owning a notable exception is that if a household knows that a change in an influential variable will occur but it does not know the direction of change it is more likely to rent initially

supply side interventions and redistribution we evaluate the eect on welfare of shifting the burden of capi tal income taxes to labor taxes in a dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and constant tax rates we calibrate and simu late the economy we nd that lowering capital taxes has two eects i it increases e ciency in terms of aggregate production and ii it redistributes wealth in favor of those agents with a low wage wealth ratio when the parameters of the model are calibrated to match the distribution of income in terms of the wage wealth ratio the redis tributive eect dominates and agents with a high wage wealth ratio would experience a large loss in utility if capital income taxes were eliminated

a model of rental and owner occupied housing abstract a complete model of owner occupied and rental housing is developed the model allows for the endogenous determination of rents the user cost of owner occupied housing and housing tenure choice by individuals in the short run structure prices are endogenous while in the long run the size of the housing stock adjusts to equate structure prices to exogenous construction costs comparative static results emphasize the importance of marginal tax rates and distinguishing between the short and long run for a complete understanding of the impacts of inflation on housing markets

the impact of transaction costs and the expected length of stay on homeownership abstract economic theory suggests that an increase in the expected length of stay in a dwelling increases the probability of a household choosing to own a house rather than rent this hypothesis is derived from recognition that there are substantial transaction costs associated with homeownership and increased expected time in the home reduces the annualized transaction cost using a military data set we confirm that expected length of stay in a dwelling and the transaction costs of selling are very important to the ownership decision our best estimate of the transaction costs of selling a home are the sum of 3 of house value and 4 of household earnings

credit rationing and the demand for owner occupied housing abstract this study applies cross sectional data to test whether default risk induced credit constraints affect the demand for owner occupied housing credit constrained households are argued to exhibit different elasticities of demand for housing than less constrained households housing demand elasticities are then estimated separately for households obtaining va insured and non va loans the government guarantee on va loans insures lenders against default enabling lenders to apply easier nonprice terms of credit results indicate that observed demand elasticities differ significantly across va and conventional mortgage holders that marginal changes in credit constraints affect housing demand and that fha financing mitigates the effect of mortgage constraints

income taxes and housing this paper presents new estimates of the distributional impact of special income tax provisions relating to housing it also discusses possible secondary effects of these tax factors resulting from adjustments in the returns to capital shifts in investment and changes in the housing stock the tax benefits to homeowners are shown to be

depreciation of housing capital maintenance and house price inflation estimates from a repeat sales model abstract the rate at which physical capital depreciates is fundamental to investment in the economy nevertheless although housing capital accounts for one third of the total capital stock the rate at which housing capital depreciates has only rarely been directly estimated in part because prior studies do not control for maintenance for that same reason widely publicized measures of house price appreciation overstate the capital gain from homeownership using data from the american housing survey we examine these issues over the 1983 to 2001 period results indicate that gross of maintenance housing depreciates at roughly 2 5 percent per year while net of maintenance housing depreciates at approximately 2 percent per year moreover although the typical home appreciated at an annual real rate of roughly 0 75 percent after allowing for depreciation and maintenance the average homeowner experienced little capital gain

old homes externalities and poor neighborhoods a model of urban decline and renewal abstract this paper investigates urban decline and renewal in the united states using three panels that follow neighborhoods on a geographically consistent basis over extended periods of time findings indicate that change in neighborhood economic status is common averaging roughly 13 percent per decade roughly two thirds of neighborhoods studied in 1950 were of quite different economic status fifty years later panel unit root tests for 35 msas indicate that neighborhood economic status is a stationary process consistent with long running cycles of decline and renewal in philadelphia county a complete cycle appears to last up to 100 years aging housing stocks and redevelopment contribute to these patterns as do local externalities associated with social interactions lower income neighborhoods appear to be especially sensitive to the presence of individuals that provide social capital many of the factors that drive change at the local level have large and policy relevant effects

the term structure of interest rates with housing abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model to study the link between the amount of capital invested in housing assets and the term structure of interest rates in the model the production of housing assets is irreversible and housing assets can be used as collateral for borrowing funds agents decisions about consumption and investments in housing and non housing assets generate a time varying market price of risk that drives the dynamics of the term structure the calibration to u s data using the simulated method of moments technique captures the dynamics of consumption and the short and long term interest rates

moving costs and housing demand abstract several recent housing demand studies use samples of recent movers based on the presumption that only such households are on their demand curves we find contrary to this presumption that the absolute values of the residuals from a standard housing demand equation fall with duration in the present dwelling this shows that the correlation pattern between housing and the explanatory variables at the moving date does not correspond to the average pattern over a typical housing spell we interpret this as evidence of forward looking behavior and show how it may be handled in econometric work with cross section samples

the allocation of capital between residential and nonresidential uses taxes inflation and capital market constraints we have constructed a simple two sector model of the demand for housing and corporate capital economic growth and an increase in the inflation rate were then simulated with a number of model variants the model and simulation experiments illustrate both the tax bias in favor of housing and the manner in which the increase in inflation between 1965 and 1978 magnified it the existence of capital market constraints offsets the bias against corporate capital but it introduces a sharp inefficient reallocation of housing from less wealthy constrained households to wealthy households who do not have gains on mortgages and are not financially constrained

estimating demand for owner occupied housing subject to the income tax the federal income tax code includes several provisions which benefit homeowners first the imputed rent from the ownership of a house is not incorporated into a household s taxable income second mortgage interest and property tax payments are tax deductible finally capital gains go untaxed if they are reinvested these provisions reduce the effective price of housing services by reducing the factor prices for land and structure but they do not reduce the price of operating inputs nor do they necessarily reduce the prices of land and structure proportionately thus they alter the optimum factor input combinations in the production of owner occupant housing services by influencing relative factor prices the homeowner tax provisions also increase effective income if the deductions and exclusions are large enough to shift the households into a lower tax bracket in this case the household receives an effective income transfer in the amount of income saved by not having to pay taxes at a higher rate few attempts at quantifying owner occupant demand behavior have systematically incorporated federal income tax provisions none have considered the effects of these provisions on housing service production behavior maisel et al 121 conducted a study in which income but not price was adjusted for taxes while straszheim 21 using household interview data made an adjustment to the gross price of housing without adjusting income in an analysis of the welfare effects of owner occupant tax benefits laidler l l acknowledges that taxes alter both price and income but uses an estimate of price elasticity which does not incorporate income tax provisions rosen 18 191 however has adjusted both price and income for taxes in a recent estimation of housing demand while rosen s work represents a

homeownership in the 1980s and 1990s aggregate trends and racial gaps abstract housing policy under the clinton and bush administrations has sought to boost homeownership while also narrowing racial gaps in owner occupancy rates against that backdrop homeownership rose sharply in the 1990s but white minority gaps remain in excess of 25 percentage points we analyze these patterns using data from the 1983 to 2001 survey of consumer finances results indicate that household characteristics explain most of the increase in homeownership and roughly two thirds of the white minority homeownership gap credit barriers account for no more than 5 percentage points of the remaining gap this suggests that policy makers will need to look beyond innovations in mortgage finance if their goal is to further expand homeownership

exchange rate pass through to import prices and monetary policy in south africa abstractunderstanding how import prices adjust to exchange rates helps anticipate inflation effects and monetary policy responses this article examines exchange rate pass through to the monthly import price index in south africa during 1980 2009 short horizon pass through estimates are calculated using both single equation equilibrium correction models and systems johansen models controlling for both domestic and foreign costs average pass through is incomplete at about 50 per cent within a year and 30 per cent in six months and in the long run from the johansen analysis including feedback effects is about 55 per cent there is evidence of slower pass through under inflation targeting pass through is found to decline with recent exchange rate volatility and there is evidence for asymmetry with greater pass through occurring for small appreciations

a residence time model of housing markets abstract this paper estimates a semi markov model of housing markets in which families move from one home to another spend a random amount of time in each home and choose whether to own or to rent at each move limiting conditions of the semi markov process are used to characterize the steady state frequency of owner occupied housing and to simulate the impact of changes in housing tax policy this approach differs markedly from previous studies of housing tax policy which focus on the entire population as opposed to the movers and ignore the effect of household residence times see king 1980 rosen 1979 white and white 1977 or laidler 1969 residence times further influence the analysis by affecting the relative cost of owning to renting in the tenure choice model homeowners pay legal and realtor fees at the time they move out of their homes which renters do not have to pay the discounted value of these fees declines with length of stay and provides a structural explanation of why families with longer residence times have a greater propensity to own results from the empirical analysis suggest that the semi markov model closely predicts conditions in the united states and provide important insights into the effects of housing tax policy residence times are also found to influence household tenure choice through their impact on the discounted legal and realtor fees paid by homeowners

cross sectional estimation of a simultaneous model of tenure choice and housing services demand abstract in this paper we analyze the demand for housing services integrating into a single analysis a systematic treatment of several important conceptual and empirical issues our three major objectives are to 1 evaluate the empirical importance of the simultaneity between the tenure choice and consumption level decisions 2 analyze the relationship between household type and housing demand and 3 present new estimates of the parameters of housing demand which are based on detailed microdata in the process we derive and estimate overall income and price demand elasticities which incorporate the impacts of income and price on both the tenure choice and consumption level decisions

estimating and decomposing changes in the white black homeownership gap from 2005 to 2011 this study evaluates the effects of the recent us housing bust on the white black homeownership gap by estimating and decomposing the changes in the distribution of the gap between 2005 and 2011 our analysis shows that the housing bust did not affect the homeownership gap uniformly in fact we find that the gap decreased for households that were the least likely to own and remained unchanged for households that were the most likely to own and that black households with around a 50 probability of homeownership were especially vulnerable to the crisis we also find that the contribution of the residual gap was modest changes in the white black homeownership gap over the sample period are mainly attributed to changes in household income whether the household earned dividend interest or rental income and marital status with the extent of their respective influences varying over the homeownership distribution our empirical approach reveals distributional information on the determinants of the changes

residential mobility and the housing market in a two sector neoclassical growth model the impact of residential mobility and competitive housing markets on long run growth is examined using a two sector general equilibrium overlapping generations model in continuous time there is an infinity of agents with finite lives who adjust their housing consumption by moving which is costly we explore the model s steady state properties first with a free housing market then under rent control when the market clears through restrictions on the frequency of moves rent controls do not just reduce welfare they may increase the steadystate capital labor ratio

all or nothing ordering under a capacity constraint we consider a special case of the single item periodic review inventory control problem with fixed plus linear ordering costs and an upper bound on production capacity we assume that the fixed cost is large relative to the variable cost and restrict our analysis to full capacity orders we show that the optimal policy is a threshold policy with respect to the inventory position for a class of cost to go functions that include the class of convex functions