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Abstract As more urban residents find their housing through online search tools, recent research has theorized the potential for online information to transform and equalize the housing search process. Yet, very little is known about what rental housing information is available online. Using a corpus of millions of geocoded Craigslist advertisements for rental housing across the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States merged with census tract–level data from the American Community Survey, we identify and describe the types of information commonly included in listings across different types of neighborhoods. We find that in the online housing market, renters are exposed to fundamentally different types of information depending on the ethnoracial and socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhoods where they are searching.
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Housing, Distribution, and Welfare
Housing is a long-lived asset whose value is sensitive to variations in expectations of long-run growth rates and interest rates. When a large fraction of households has leverage, housing price fluctuations cause large-scale redistribution and consumption volatility.We find that a practical way to insure the young and the poor from the housing market fluctuations is through awell-functioning rental market. In practice, homeownership subsidies keep the rental market small and the housing cycle affects aggregate consumption. Removing homeownership subsidies hurts old homeowners, while leverage limits hurt young homeowners
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- Award ID(s):
- 2215080
- PAR ID:
- 10512919
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of money credit and banking
- ISSN:
- 0022-2879
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jmcb.13136
