Research

Publications

I am Jane. Do I Pay More in the Housing Market?

with Myongjin Kim, Leilei Shen, and Brent Norwood.
Economic Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 39(2), pages 1612-1620.

Do women pay more than men in the housing market? We utilize repeat-sales housing data from ZTRAX to examine if gender gaps exist in house purchase prices and loan-to-price ratios. We find that female homebuyers pay a 2% premium on average. In addition, female homebuyers’ loan to price ratio is 3 percentage points lower than that of male buyers. We also show that female buyers pay less when the seller is female than when the seller is male. However, the gender price differentials and loan-to-price differentials are disappearing in more recent years. One possible explanation for the disappearing gender price differentials in house prices and loan-to-price ratios is the shrinking of the gender wage gap in recent years.

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Working Papers

The Willingness to Pay for a Cooler Day: Evidence from 50 Years of Major League Baseball

with Melissa LoPalo and Kevin Kuruc
Accepted at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

The climate-economy literature has documented adverse effects of extreme temperatures on well-being through mechanisms such as mortality, productivity, and conflict. Impacts due simply to discomfort are less well understood. This paper investigates individuals’ valuations of weather using a revealed preference approach. Using 50 years of data, we first quantify the decline in attendance at Major League Baseball games on hot days. Leveraging this finding coupled with historically-informed assumptions on the supply curve, we infer a monetized estimate of the disutility of heat. We estimate a $1 utility loss per hour of exposure to high temperatures, implying non-trivial aggregate welfare effects.

Retail Marijuana Deregulation and Housing Prices

with Donggeun Kim and Brent Norwood, 2020.

Despite federal law, twelve American states and Washington D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana since 2012. Using a national housing data set from the online real estate listing database Zillow.com, we identify the cross and inter-state effects of marijuana legalization on house prices in different points of the price distribution function. We find positive effects upwards of ten percent in the top half of the price distribution following successful legalization ballot initiatives, and between five and fifteen percent across the distribution after the state enacts the ballot initiative and the first legal sales take place. A spatial difference-in-differences model reveals that within Colorado and Washington, prices in neighborhoods with new dispensary openings nearby experience a seven percent price appreciation. To summarize, our results suggest that there are second order benefits to marijuana legalization