This paper develops first measures of housing sentiment for 34 cities across the United States by quantifying the qualitative tone of local housing news. Housing media sentiment has significant predictive power for future house prices, leading prices by nearly two years. Consistent with theories of investor sentiment, the media sentiment index has a greater effect in markets in which speculative investors are more prevalent and demand appears less informed. Directly examining the content across news articles finds that results are not driven by news stories of unobserved fundamentals.

This paper isolates the causal impact of neighborhood environment on the credit outcomes of low-income borrowers by analyzing the participants of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO was a unique, large-scale experiment that offered families vouchers to move to better neighborhoods via randomized lottery. We find higher credit scores and use among those required to move to the lowest poverty areas as young children. For those who moved as adults, we find that better neighborhoods lead to a reduction of overdue debts and delinquencies, but only among those given unrestricted neighborhood choice.

This study isolates the causal effects of financial literacy and schooling on wealth accumulation using a new household dataset and an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Financial literacy and schooling attainment are both strongly positively associated with wealth outcomes in linear regression models, whereas the IV estimates reveal even more potent effects of financial literacy. They also indicate that the schooling effect only becomes positive when interacted with financial literacy. Estimated impacts are substantial enough to imply that investments in financial literacy could have large wealth payoffs.