We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past 25 years and a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the 1980s and 1990s. We impute the aggregate value of owner-occupied housing, the value of financial assets, and measures of aggregate consumption for each of the geographic units over time.We estimate regression models in levels, first differences and in error-correction form, relating consumption to income and wealth measures. We find a statistically significant and rather large effect of housing wealth upon household consumption.

The behavior of the building and real estate sectors are quite important in matters of environmental sustainability. It is reported, for example, that buildings account for approximately forty percent of the consumption of raw materials and energy. In addition, 55 percent of the wood that is not used for fuel is consumed in construction. Overall, buildings and their associated construction activity account for at least 30 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, RICS, 2005).

As applied to the behavior of homeowners with mortgages, option theory predicts that mortgage prepayment or default will be exercised if the call or put option is ''in the money'' by some specific amount. Our analysis: tests the extent to which the option approach can explain default and prepayment behavior; evaluates the practical importance of modeling both options simultaneously; and models the unobserved heterogeneity of borrowers in the home mortgage market. The paper presents a unified model of the competing risks of mortgage termination by prepayment and default, considering the two hazards as dependent competing risks that are estimated jointly. It also accounts for the unobserved heterogeneity among borrowers, and estimates the unobserved heterogeneity simultaneously with the parameters and baseline hazards associated with prepayment and default functions.Our results show that the option model, in its most straightforward version, does a good job of explaining default and prepayment, but it is not enough by itself. The simultaneity of the options is very important empirically in explaining behavior. The results also show that there exists significant heterogeneity among mortgage borrowers. Ignoring this heterogeneity results in serious errors in estimating the prepayment behavior of homeowners.

We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past 25 years and a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the 1980s and 1990s. We impute the aggregate value of owner-occupied housing, the value of financial assets, and measures of aggregate consumption for each of the geographic units over time. We estimate regressions relating consumption to income and wealth measures, finding a statistically significant and rather large effect of housing wealth upon household consumption.

a b s t r a c tEnergy consumption in the residential sector offers an important opportunity for conserving resources. However, much of the current debate regarding energy efficiency in the housing market focuses on the physical and technical determinants of energy consumption, neglecting the role of the economic behavior of resident households. In this paper, we analyze the extent to which the use of gas and electricity is determined by the technical specifications of the dwelling as compared to the demographic characteristics of the residents. Our analysis is based on a sample of more than 300,000 Dutch homes and their occupants. The results indicate that residential gas consumption is determined principally by structural dwelling characteristics, such as the vintage, building type, and characteristics of the dwelling, while electricity consumption varies more directly with household composition, in particular income and family composition. Combining these results with projections on future economic and demographic trends, we find that, even absent price increases for residential energy, the aging of the population and their increasing wealth will roughly offset improvements in the energy efficiency of the building stock resulting from policy interventions and natural revitalization.

This paper considers the heterogeneity and diversity of cities as sources of economic growth. It links modern notions of economic growth to the distinguishing characteristics of cities and to the external effects on consumption and production produced by the internal diversity of urban areas. The paper reviews the role of traditional scale economies as well as the importance of diversity in economizing on shared inputs and transactions costs, and efficiencies arising from the operation of the law of large numbers in metropolitan areas. The authors also review recent empirical evidence on the importance of these elements of heterogeneity in conditioning economic growth.

Research on climate change suggests that small improvements in the "sustainability" of buildings can have large effects on greenhouse gas emissions and on energy efficiency in the economy. This paper analyzes the economics of "green" building. First, we analyze a panel of office buildings certified by independent rating agencies, finding that large recent increases in the supply of green buildings and the unprecedented volatility in property markets have not significantly affected the relative returns to green buildings. Second, we analyze a large cross section of office buildings, demonstrating that economic premiums in rent and asset values of buildings certified for energy efficiency are substantial. Third, we relate the economic premiums for green buildings to their relative efficiency in energy use, documenting that the attributes rated for both thermal efficiency and sustainability contribute to premiums in rents and asset values. Even among green buildings, increased energy efficiency is fully capitalized into rents and asset values.

This paper reviews trends in housing affordability in the U.S. over the past four decades. There is little evidence that owner-occupied housing has become less affordable. In contrast, there have been modest increases in the fraction of income that the median renter household devotes to housing. We find pronounced increases in the rent burdens for poor households. We explore the low-income rental market in more detail, analyzing the relative importance of changes in the income distribution, in housing quality, land use regulation, and zoning in affecting rent burdens. We also sketch out some policies that might improve housing affordability.