This paper examines the contribution of out-of-town second-house buyers to mispricing in the housing market. We show that demand from out-of-town second-house buyers during the mid 2000s predicted not only house-price appreciation rates but also impliedto-actual-rent-ratio appreciation rates, a proxy for mispricing. We then apply a novel identification strategy to address the issue of reverse causality. We give supporting evidence that out-of-town second-house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators, earning lower capital gains (misinformed) and consuming smaller dividends (speculators).

Evidence from the Boston condominium market of the early 1990's reveals that an owner's equity position determines his experience as a seller. An owner of a property with a high loan-to-value ratio sets a higher asking price, has a higher expected time on the market and, if he sells, receives a higher price than an owner with proportionately less debt. The down payment requirement for purchasers, but not incumbent owners, provides a simple explanation for this phenomenon among owner-occupants. The results provide supporting evidence for equity-based aggregate theories of price-volume movements in the housing market.

This paper examines the contribution of out-of-town second-house buyers to mispricing in the housing market. We show that demand from out-of-town second-house buyers during the mid 2000s predicted not only house-price appreciation rates but also implied-to-actual-rent-ratio appreciation rates, a proxy for mispricing. We then apply a novel identification strategy to address the issue of reverse causality. We give supporting evidence that out-of-town second-house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators, earning lower capital gains (misinformed) and consuming smaller dividends (speculators). Received August 4, 2014; accepted August 28, 2015 by Editor Stefan Nagel.

We examine two factors that explain air traffic congestion: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. While both factors impact congestion, we find that the hubbing effect dominates empirically. Hub carriers incur most of the additional travel time from hubbing, primarily because they cluster their flights in short time spans to provide passengers as many potential connections as possible with a minimum of waiting time. Non-hub flights at the same hub airports operate with minimal additional travel time. These results suggest that an optimal congestion tax might have a relatively small impact on flight patterns at hub airports.

Environmental regulation in the United States has undergone a slow evolution from command and control strategies towards market-based regulations. One such innovation is the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a regulation that requires polluting firms to publicly disclose information about their toxic emissions. The basic tenet of this regulation is that it corrects for informational asymmetries between polluters and households, allowing communities to pressure polluters to decrease their emissions. Policy-makers have judged the TRI a tremendous success, as national releases declined by 43% between 1988 and 1999. Yet many of the fundamental problems which are known to lead to the classic failure of the Coase theorem (such as high transaction costs and difficulties in organizing) cast doubt on the effectiveness of disclosure rules, alone, to lead to an efficient outcome in the case of pollution. We use an event study methodology with high-quality data on house prices and other local attributes to assess the extent to which the public values changes in toxic releases and thus the success of TRI. Our major findings include: (1) declines in toxic releases appear unrelated to any political economy variables that might lead to public activism; (2) initial information released under TRI had no significant effect on the distribution of house prices; and (3) house prices show no significant impact of declines in reported toxic releases over time. Standard errors are small enough that we can reject the hypothesis that large declines in toxic releases lead to more than a 0.5% increase in house prices. These results also hold when we control for differences in the availability of information on TRI and the possible effect of expectations. Our findings cast doubt on the ability of the public to process complex information on hazardous emissions and support the Coase theorem in that right-to-know laws such as TRI may not be the most effective form of environmental regulation.

Issuer Credit Quality and the Price of Asset Backed Securities by Oliver Faltin-Traeger, Kathleen W. Johnson and Christopher Mayer. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 501-05 of American Economic Review, May 2010

Prior empirical evidence regarding the impact of dividend taxes on firm valuation is mixed. This study avoids some of the complications encountered in previous empirical work by exploiting institutional characteristics of REITs, such as their limited discretion over dividend policy and the relative transparency of REIT assets. We regress the market value of equity on the market value of assets and tax basis, which creates tax deductions that lower future dividend taxes without affecting future pretax cash flow. We find that firm value is positively related to tax basis, suggesting that future dividend taxes are capitalized into share prices.

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of US state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously delinquent borrowers. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that Countrywide's monthly delinquency rate increased more than 0.54 percentage points—a 10 percent relative increase—immediately after the settlement's announcement. The estimated increase in default rates is largest among borrowers least likely to default otherwise. These results suggest that strategic behavior should be an important consideration in designing mortgage modification programs. (JEL D14, G21, K22, R31)