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- show abstract
During the housing bust of 2008--2009, home prices and transaction volumes fell across the entire United Kingdom. However, while the fall in prices was similar across housing types, transaction volumes fell more for homes at the lower end of the market. I document this fact and provide panel and instrumental variable estimates showing its link with tightening credit conditions in the United Kingdom in 2008. I then use an overlapping-generations framework to relate the change in the composition of sales with the reduction in loan-to-value ratios by British banks and to derive additional predictions. As down-payment requirements increase, young households with scarce financial resources are priced out by older owners who retain their previous houses for renting when trading up. Recent changes in aggregate housing tenure as well as changes in the number of sales and rentals in areas with different age compositions are consistent with these predictions. The results presented here show how the composition of sales change over the housing cycle and inform recent policy discussions about reduced access to home ownership by the young.
(see Poster)
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Distributive Politics inside the City. The Political Economy of
Spain's Plan E (with Luca
Repetto)
- show abstract
We
study the allocation of public works by municipal governments across
groups of voters using data from a stimulus program deployed in Spain
between 2009 and 2011. The program provided municipalities with over
250 Euros per capita to be spent in public investments and
geo-referenced each individual project. Combining investment data with
disaggregated electoral information for over 35,000 census areas, we
study whether local governments target core voters, swing voters, or
low turnout areas. We find that investment goes disproportionately to
low turnout areas, suggesting that politicians use public works to
mobilize the electorate. We study the electoral response to the
investment program and find that, in the following election, turnout
increases in areas that received a project. Our study is innovative in
studying policy allocations across voter groups rather than electoral
districts or municipalities.
Other Research Work
- show abstract
We
study the allocation of public works by municipal governments across
groups of voters using data from a stimulus program deployed in This
paper studies the effect of holding a mortgage on quit rates for a
subsample of young workers between ages 25 and 37 extracted from the
NLSY79, a well known US survey. I show that workers who have to meet
mortgage payments have, ceteris paribus, lower quit rates. Results show
that mortgage paying workers have lower quit propensities than the rest
of workers after controlling for covariates and unobserved
heterogeneity. Some suggestive results pointing to a possible causal
link are also provided. However, no definite causal relationship can be
established and interpretation of results must be cautious.
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