You Can Take It with You: Proposition 13 Tax Benefits, Residential Mobility, and Willingness to Pay for Housing Amenities

The endogeneity of prices has long been recognized as the main identification problem in the estimation of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the characteristics of a given product. This issue is particularly important in the housing market, since a number of housing and neighborhood features are unobserved by the econometrician. This paper proposes the use of a well defined type of transaction costs–moving costs generated by property tax laws–to deal with this type of omitted variable bias. California\u27s Proposition 13 property tax law is the source of variation in transaction costs used in the empirical analysis. Beyond its fiscal consequences, Proposition 13 created a lock-in effect on housing choice because of the implicit tax break enjoyed by homeowners living in the same house for a long time. Its importance to homeowners is estimated from a natural experiment created by two amendments that allow households headed by an individual over the age of 55 to transfer the implicit tax benefit to a new home. Indeed, 55-year old homeowners have 25% higher moving rates than those of comparable 54 year olds. These transaction costs from the property tax laws are then incorporated into a household sorting model. The key insight is that because of the property tax laws, different potential buyers may have different user costs for the same house. The exogenous property tax component of this user cost is then used as an instrumental variable. I find that MWTP estimates for housing characteristics are approximately 100% upward biased when the choice model does not account for the price endogeneity

You Can Take It With You: Transferability of Proposition 13 Tax Benefits, Residential Mobility, and Willingness to Pay for Housing Amenities

The endogeneity of prices has long been recognized as the main identification problem in the estimation of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the characteristics of a given product. This issue is particularly important in the housing market, since a number of housing and neighborhood features are unobserved by the econometrician. This paper proposes the use of a well defined type of transaction costs–moving costs generated by property tax laws–to deal with this type of omitted variable bias. California\u27s Proposition 13 property tax law is the source of variation in transaction costs used in the empirical analysis. Beyond its fiscal consequences, Proposition 13 created a lock-in effect on housing choice because of the implicit tax break enjoyed by homeowners living in the same house for a long time. Its importance to homeowners is estimated from a natural experiment created by two amendments that allow households headed by an individual over the age of 55 to transfer the implicit tax benefit to a new home. Indeed, 55-year old homeowners have 25% higher moving rates than those of comparable 54 year olds. These transaction costs from the property tax laws are then incorporated into a household sorting model. The key insight is that because of the property tax laws, different potential buyers may have different user costs for the same house. The exogenous property tax component of this user cost is then used as an instrumental variable. I find that MWTP estimates for housing characteristics are approximately 100% upward biased when the choice model does not account for the price endogeneity

Do School Entry Laws Affect Educational Attainment and Labor Market Outcomes?

Age based school entry laws force parents and educators to consider an important tradeoff: though students who are the youngest in their school cohort typically have poorer academic performance, on average, they have slightly higher educational attainment. In this paper we document that for a large cohort of California and Texas natives the school entry laws increased educational attainment of students who enter school early, but also lowered their academic performance while in school. However, we find no evidence that the age at which children enter school effects job market outcomes, such as wages or the probability of employment. This suggests that the net effect on adult labor market outcomes of the increased educational attainment and poorer academic performance is close to zero

Anatomy of the Beginning of the Housing Boom: U.S. Neighborhoods and Metropolitan Areas, 1993-2009

We provide novel estimates of the timing, magnitudes, and potential determinants of the start of the last housing boom across American neighborhoods and metropolitan areas (MSAs) using a rich new micro data set containing 23 million housing transactions in 94 metropolitan areas between 1993 and 2009. We also match transactions data with loan information, enabling us to observe household income and other demographics for each neighborhood. Five major findings are reported. First, the start of the boom was not a single, national event. Booms, which are defined by the global breakpoint in an area\u27s price appreciation series, begin at different times over a decade-long period from 1995-2006. Second, the magnitude of the initial jump in house price appreciation at the start of the boom is economically, not just statistically, significant. On average, log house prices are over four points higher during the first year of the boom relative to the previous twelve month period for both MSAs and neighborhoods. There is no evidence that price growth was trending up prior to the start of the boom. Third, local income is the only potential demand shifter found that also had an economically and statistically significant change around the time that local housing booms began. Contemporaneous local income growth is large enough to account for half or more of the initial jump in house price appreciation. While these estimates indicate that the beginning of the boom was fundamentally justified on average, they do not imply that what followed was rational. Fourth, there is important heterogeneity in that result. Income growth is large and jumps at the same time as house price appreciation in areas that boomed early and have inelastic supplies of housing, but not in late booming areas and those with elastic supply sides. Fifth and finally, none of the demand-shifters analyzed show positive pre-trends, but some such as the share of subprime lending, do lag the beginning of the boom. This suggests that key players in the lending market more responded to the boom, rather than caused it to start

Heterogeneity in Neighborhood-Level Price Growth in the United States, 1993–2009

Examination of detailed geographical information on U.S. housing transactions from 1993 to 2009 find much heterogeneity at the neighborhood level in when the recent boom began, how big the initial jumps in price growth were, how long the booms lasted, and what types of neighborhoods boomed first. There is less neighborhood-level heterogeneity in when the bust began and in aggregate price appreciation during the boom. This heterogeneity suggests that there was no one dominant cause of the boom. We also comment on how very local data may help understand the role of contagion, among other housing market phenomena

Does Gender Matter for Political Leadership? The Case of U.S. Mayors

What are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes? We answer this question in the context of U.S. cities, where women\u27s participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one-third of the elections in the 2000\u27s. A novel data set of U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used, and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics. In contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership, we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. These results hold both in the short and the long run. While female mayors do not implement different policies, they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills, as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male. But we find no evidence of political spillovers: exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections

Pop Internationalism: Has Half a Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?

Advances in communication technologies have increased the availability of cultural goods across borders, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies will displace those in smaller economies. This article provides stylised facts about global music consumption and trade since 1960 using a unique data on popular music charts corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. Contrary to growing fears about large-country dominance, our gravity estimates show a substantial bias towards domestic music that has, perhaps surprisingly, increased in the past decade. Moreover, we find no evidence that new communications channels reduce the consumption of domestic music

Housing Busts and Household Mobility

Using two decades of American Housing Survey data from 1985 to 2007, we revisit the literature on lock-in effects and provide new estimates of the impacts of negative equity and rising interest rates on the mobility of owners. Both lead to substantially lower mobility rates. Owners suffering from negative equity are one-third less mobile, and every added $1000 in real annual mortgage costs lowers mobility by about 12%. Our results cannot simply be extrapolated to the future, but they do have potentially important implications for policy makers concerned about the consequences of the housing bust that began as our data series ended. In particular, they indicate that we need to begin considering the consequences of lock-in and reduced household mobility because they are quite different from those associated with default and higher mobility

The Vulnerability of Minority Homeowners in the Housing Boom and Bust

This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets. Among those with similar credit scores and loan attributes, black and Hispanic homeowners had much higher rates of delinquency and default in the downturn. These estimated differences are especially pronounced for loans originated near the peak of the housing boom. These findings suggest that black and Hispanic homeowners drawn into the market near the peak were especially vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and raise concerns about homeownership as a mechanism for reducing racial disparities in wealth