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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 150 No. 1 2023

The short- and long-run effects of remote work on U.S. housing markets

Greg Howard1; Jack Liebersohn2; Adam Ozimek3

1 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2 University of California, Irvine · 3 Economic Innovation Group, USA

open access

Abstract

Remote work has increased the demand for housing and changed the demand for the location of that housing. Because housing supply is heterogeneous across space and more elastic in the long-run, the effects on rents and populations may differ over time. We use the lens of a spatial housing model with heterogeneous housing supply elasticities to identify the housing and location demand changes from 2020–2022, and show that the same shocks will have different effects in the long run. Even though rents and prices increased significantly in the short-run, we estimate that in the long-run, increased housing demand will increase rents by only 1.8 percentage points, and that changing location demand will decrease rents by 0.3 percentage points, with a more negative impact on cities in which CPI is measured and cities that were initially expensive.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2023.103705
Volume
150
Issue
1
Pages
166-184
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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