We develop a life-cycle model to study the effects of house price changes on household consumption and welfare. The model explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset and allows for costly adjustments in housing and mortgage positions. Our analysis indicates that although house price changes have small aggregate effects, their consumptio...

We investigate a household’s asset allocation, housing, and mortgage decisions in a calibrated life-cycle model with costly stock market entry and participation and a risky housing market featuring housing adjustment costs, mortgage collateral borrowing requirement, refinancing charge, and default penalty. Our analysis demonstrates that a household’s liquid wealth is the most important determin...

We present a structural model of urban growth in a spatial equilibrium setting to aid the separation of the effects of demand shocks from those of the spatial variation in housing supply elasticity. The model is applied to an analysis of urban growth across Chines cities between 1998 and 2004, to evaluate the determinants of housing supply elasticity. The variation in supply, via urban expansio...

Although gestation stalls have provided a reduction in building and labor costs to producers, they remain a controversial system of swine production in terms of animal welfare. Gestation stalls physically limit the sow to standing, sitting, and lying. Several studies have suggested that repetitive abnormal behaviors, termed stereotypic and considered an indicator of poor welfare, can be induced...

By enabling low-income families to move from highto low-poverty neighbourhoods, tenant-based rental subsidies for poor families have the potential to reduce the degree of economic segregation in the US. This paper provides a framework for identifying the beneŽts and costs of such housing mobility programmes, and reviews the available empirical evidence on the net effects of quasior formal rando...

Differences in Quality of Life Estimates Using Rents and Home Values Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages”, where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous researchers typically have us...

BACKGROUND A rapid increase of Medicaid expenditures has been a serious concern, and housing stability has been discussed as a means to reduce Medicaid costs. A program evaluation of a New York City supportive housing program has assessed the association between supportive housing tenancy and Medicaid savings among New York City housing program applicants with serious mental illness and chronic...

BACKGROUND Supported housing, integrating clinical and housing services, is a widely advocated intervention for homeless people with mental illness. In 1992, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) established the HUD-VA Supported Housing (HUD-VASH) program. METHODS Homeless veterans with psychiatric and/or substance abuse disord...

This paper analyzes price tradeoffs between residential quality and location factors in the Beijing housing market. Unlike most housing markets, location factors completely dominate housing prices in this market. The main reason for this appears to be the physical size of central Beijing, where travel times between different urban activity centers are comparable to typical suburban-urban commut...

With prices skyrocketing for housing, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is much talk about a housing bubble. However, the rapid price increases could also be due to changes in fundamentals: implicit rents, interest rates, and property and income tax rates. I use sales and implicit rental data from 1983 to 2005 for the City of San Francisco that is available through national accoun...