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Efficiency in housing markets: Which home buyers know how to discount?

Journal of Banking & Finance 2009 33(11), 2150-2163
We test for efficiency in the Swedish co-op market by examining the negative relationship between the sales price and the present value of future monthly payments or ‘rents’. If the co-op housing market is efficient, the present value of co-op rental payments due to underlying debt obligations of the cooperative should be fully reflected in the sales price. However, a one hundred kronor increase in the present value of future rents only leads to an approximately 75 kronor reduction in the sales price. These inefficiencies are larger at the lower end of the housing market and in poorer, less educated regions and appear to reflect both liquidity constraints and the existence of more ‘sophisticated’ buyers in higher educated areas. Overall, our findings suggest that there is some systematic failure to properly discount the future stream of rent payments relative to the up front sales price.

Building Criminal Capital behind Bars: Peer Effects in Juvenile Corrections*

Quarterly Journal of Economics 2009 124(1), 105-147 open access
This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the nonrandom assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior-offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses. The influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category. We also find evidence that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus nonresidential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home.