The turmoil that started with increased defaults in the subprime mortgage market has generated instability in the financial system around the world. To better understand the root causes of this financial instability, we quantify the relative importance of various drivers behind subprime...

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities that government officials face in designing coherent 'rules of the game' for achieving urban sustainability during times of growth. Sustainability is judged by three criteria. The first involves elements of day-to-day quality of life, such as...

This paper presents a new method for ranking city quality of life. I use data from the 1980 and the 1990 Census of Population and Housing to rank cities. My approach relaxes the standard quot;hedonicquot; method's assumptions that all city local public goods are observed and that the implicit...

More than 17 percent of households in American central cities live in poverty; in American suburbs, just 7.4 percent of households live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to be the result of wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap...

Unplanned suburban growth imposes social costs such as congestion, pollution, and open space reduction. Anti-sprawl policies are being adopted in fast growing metropolitan areas. This paper explores one potential benefit of sprawl. Sprawl increases housing affordability and this may contribute...

August 2002 <p> We present a three-stage estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage, we estimate a non-parametric hedonic home price function. Second, we recover each consumer’s taste parameters for product characteristics using first order...</p>

Revised March 2001 <p> This paper estimates a discrete choice model of housing product demand to study the causes of black urbanization. Our estimation strategy incorporates that there are unobserved product attributes which are correlated with observed product attributes. We bound racial...</p>

We present a three-stage estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage, we estimate a non-parametric hedonic home price function. Second, we recover each consumer's taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for...