In the United States, the percentage standard deviation of residential investment is more than twice that of non-residential investment. In addition, GDP, consumption, and both types of investment co-move positively. We reproduce these facts in a calibrated multi-sector growth model where...

Cities exist because of the productivity gains arising from clustering production and workers, a process called agglomeration. How important is agglomeration for aggregate growth? This paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to estimate the effect of...

We introduce household production and the production of houses (construction) into a monetary model. Theory predicts inflation, as a tax on market activity, encourages substitution into household production and hence investment in housing. In the model, the stock and appropriately-deflated price...

This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific...

Infrastructure capital, the structures and equipment that comprise "the basic systems that bridge distance and bring productive inputs together" (Cisneros 2010), is a vital input into the productive capacity of any economy. It is often claimed that the US fails to invest sufficiently in its own...

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practice local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population...

During the 2000-2011 housing boom and bust, changes to self-assessed house prices in 20 different metro areas are highly correlated with changes to the Case-Shiller-Weiss (CSW) house price indexes, but do not change percent-for-percent with the CSW indexes during the boom or bust. We argue this...

We study models incorporating money, household production, and investment in housing. Inflation, as a tax on market activity, encourages substitution into household production, and thus investment in household capital. Hence, inflation increases the (appropriately deflated) value of the housing...

In this chapter, we review and discuss the large body of research that has developed over the past 10-plus years that explores the interconnection of macroeconomics, finance, and housing. We focus on three major topics -- housing and the business cycle, housing and portfolio choice, and housing...