Lynn M. Fisher

Tenure Choice and Labour Market Outcomes

In a series of papers Andrew Oswald has suggested that since home owners are relatively less mobile across geographic locations than renters, regional home ownership rates are positively correlated with regional unemployment rates. This paper examines this hypothesis at the individual level. Search theory suggests that when a subset of the population is less mobile than others, this less mobile group (that is, owners) will have lower probability of employment, longer spells of unemployment and lower wages than more mobile renters. These hypotheses on inferior labour market outcomes for owners were tested using US Current Population Survey data as well as data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. The empirical model suggests that these hypotheses are not supported by any of the tests. Home owners, conditionally or unconditionally, have better labour market outcomes than renters.

Amenity-Based Housing Affordability Indexes

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate-income households, especially in high-cost, supply-constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town-level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town-level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability.

Restitution in transition countries

Changing the property rights arrangements to land and buildings is a fundamental step in the transformation process underway in Eastern and Central Europe and elsewhere. The concept of property hinges on the choice of property conventions adopted by each society. Defining what property means is a complex and controversial task, especially when the scope of change in transition countries is so dramatic. Restitution is often a first step in acknowledging a latent property rights paradigm in these nations. Since property rights form the foundation of how and why economies function, it is important to identify the theoretical and empirical evidence relating property rules to economic outcomes. In this paper, we investigate why restitution is implemented in some countries but not in others. Further, if restitution is adopted, how is it implemented? We speculate that the choice of restitution as a property institution may be a proxy for the development of future institutions.