Todd M. Sinai
Research Associate
University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School
Loding Complete
Explore Research
New This Week
August 28, 2013 - Book - Conference Volume
Conventional wisdom held that housing prices couldnt fall. But the spectacular boom and bust of the housing market during the first decade of the twenty-first century and millions of foreclosed homeowners have made it clear that housing is no different from any other asset in its ability to climb...
August 16, 2012 - Chapter
Author(s) - Todd Sinai
This chapter describes empirical patterns in real house prices in the United States over the last three decades. It highlights six stylized facts. First, despite the sizable boom-bust pattern in house prices at the national level, individual housing markets in the United States experienced...
August 14, 2012 - Chapter
This chapter begins with a brief review of how America's housing market crash damaged received wisdom about housing markets and housing policy as well as the portfolios of households and financial institutions. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters. It then discusses what...
Author(s) - Todd M. Sinai
This paper describes six stylized patterns among housing markets in the United States that potential explanations of the housing boom and bust should seek to explain. First, individual housing markets in the U.S. experienced considerable heterogeneity in the amplitudes of their cycles. Second, the...
We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth before...
February 26, 2010 - Chapter
Conventional wisdom holds that one of the riskiest aspects of owning a house is the uncertainty surrounding its sale price, especially if one moves to another housing market. However, households who sell a house typically buy another house, whose purchase price is also uncertain. We show that for...
The mortgage interest deduction, the property tax deduction, the unique treatment of capital gains on owner-occupied homes, and the absence of taxation on imputed rent from owner-occupied homes all influence the effective cost of housing services. They also affect federal income tax revenues and the...
March 27, 2008 - Chapter
This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets also...
March 1, 2007 - Article
The fraction of high-income families in superstar cities is 43 percent higher than in average cities, and those cities' share of poor families is 11 percent lower. Between 1950 and 2000, the price of housing grew by an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 2.2 to 3.5 percent in the ten U.S. metropolitan...
Differences in house price and income growth rates between 1950 and 2000 across metropolitan areas have led to an ever-widening gap in housing values and incomes between the typical and highest-priced locations. We show that the growing spatial skewness in house prices and incomes are related and...
April 1, 2006 - Article
"Because real, long-term interest rates are currently so low, housing costs are more sensitive to changes in real, long-term interest rates now than at any other time in the last 25 years." For some time now, there has been much speculation in the media that house prices are unsustainably high, that...
We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the price...
We show that incorporating consumption commitments into a standard model of precautionary saving can complicate the usual relationship between risk and consumption. In particular, we present a model where the presence of plausible adjustment costs can cause a mean-preserving increase in unemployment...
August 18, 2004 - Chapter
Using tract-level data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, we estimate how the income-tax-related benefits to owner-occupiers are distributed spatially across the United States. Even though the top marginal tax rate has fallen substantially since 1979 and the tax code more generally has become...
Even though the top marginal income tax rate has fallen substantially and the tax code has become less progressive since 1979, the tax benefit to homeowners was virtually unchanged between 1979-1989, and then rose substantially between 1989-1999. Using tract-level data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000...
We study the tendency to connect to the Internet, and the online and offline shopping behavior of connected persons, to draw inferences about whether the Internet is a substitute or a complement for cities. We document that larger markets have more locally-targeted online content and that...
Many people assume that the most significant risk in the housing market is that homeowners are exposed to fluctuations in house values. However, homeownership also provides a hedge against fluctuations in future rent payments. This paper finds that, even though house price risk endogenously...
A necessary condition for justifying a policy such as publicly provided or subsidized low-income housing is that it has a real effect on recipients' outcomes. In this paper, we examine one aspect of the real effect of public or subsidized housing -- does it increase the housing stock? If subsidized...
We examine two factors that might explain the extent of air traffic delays in the United States: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. Airline hubs enable passengers to cross-connect to many destinations, thus creating network benefits that increase in the number of markets...
July 1, 2001 - Article
Homeowners in just three large Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas - Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County, New York-Northern New Jersey, and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose -- receive more than 75 percent of the country's positive net tax subsidy benefits. Much attention has been paid to the...
Using 1990 Census tract-level data, we estimate how tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing are distributed spatially across the United States, calculating their value as the difference in taxes currently paid by home owners and the taxes owners would pay if there were no preference for investing in...
We provide new evidence that corporate-level investment subsidies can be substantially capitalized into asset prices by examining the relative stock price performance of publicly traded companies in the real estate industry that should have been differentially affected by the capital gains tax rate...
Show: results