Suchergebnisse

Capital leakage is defined as the conversion into disposable income of capital invested in housing assets. In debates on the capital demands of owner-occupation, one concern is the extent to which demand for mortgage finance results from the withdrawal of capital from owner-occupied housing and its expenditure elsewhere. The paper centres on an attempt to Quantify the likely dimensions of capital leakage using national statistical sources. Within severe data constraints it is estimated that capital release may fall in the range of £1,400–£2,600 million a year at 1980 prices. The paper concludes by considering policy implications in forms of any distorting effects on the savings and housing markets.

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood demographics and neighborhood housing stock. Urban economic theory posits that housing prices in a small area should increase as quality of life increases, because people will be more willing to pay to live in the area, but these changes in prices and quality of life will also affect the demographics of the population through sorting and the housing stock through reinvestment. Using census block-group-level data, we examine how housing prices respond to the Empowerment Zone policy intervention. Changes in the other dimensions of neighborhood quality (demographics and housing stock characteristics) will also help determine the total, or full effect on housing values of the policy intervention. This paper estimates these direct and indirect effects in a simultaneous equations setting, compares indirect and full effects, and examines the robustness of the effects to alternate estimation strategies. We find strong evidence for substantively large and highly significant direct price effects, while results suggest that the indirect effects are substantively small or even negative.

The recent decline in house prices reminds us that the uncertainty in house prices may be substantial. This uncertainty is of fundamental concern to homeowners since buying or selling a home is one of the single most important financial decisions they make. This dissertation investigates house price uncertainty in the Netherlands from a homeowner's perspective. Since house prices are uncertain, homeowners have expectations about them. The first part of this dissertation examines how the sale price expectations of homeowners are formed in relation to mortgage commitment and residential mobility. The second part considers the size of house price risk and whether it is possible to reduce this risk through, for instance, a financial market for house value. The results in this dissertation show that house price risk may be considerable. Consequently, there may be an important role for governments in raising the awareness about this risk