Immigrants and Housing
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Jorge De la Roca, University of Southern California
The Impacts of Asian Immigrants on Neighborhoods and Housing Markets in the U.S.
Abstract
Asians are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group among eligible U.S. voters. The inflow of Asian immigrants into U.S. cities has been associated with local housing price appreciation. This paper decomposes the impact of Asian immigrants on local housing markets into education and non-education channels, using 2009-2019 annual county-level data. To account for the endogeneity issues in Asian immigrants’ location choice, we construct an instrumental variable by interacting the Asian population share in 1980 with the annual number of visas issued for Asian nationalities in the entire U.S. To causally identify the capitalization rate of educational quality in the housing market, we adopt the staggered roll-out of state-level teacher reforms as an instrumental variable for the changes in county-level test scores. First, we find that the housing price appreciation triggered by Asian immigrants is concentrated only in the counties with the top 5 % of the Asian population share. Second, the increased percentage of Asians in neighborhoods leads to higher test scores for students of other races. Third, our back-of-envelope calculation shows that around a third of housing price appreciation driven by a higher Asian share is attributed to the improvement in school performance in neighborhoods. This paper uncovers a significant channel through which this new wave of immigration affects the U.S. housing market.Can Legal Status Help Unauthorized Immigrants Achieve the American Dream? Evidence from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program
Abstract
This paper examines the housing tenure choices of unauthorized immigrants following the largest immigration policy change in recent years. Our identification strategy exploits the discontinuity in eligibility criteria of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and work authorization to eligible immigrants. We estimate a difference-in-differences model that compares eligible with ineligible individuals before and after the program’s implementation. Our results indicate that DACA eligible household heads become more likely to be homeowners. Thus, DACA increases access to not only the US labor market but also the benefits of homeownership.The Impact of Cultural Preferences on Homeownership
Abstract
Homeownership has long been a core tenet of the American Dream, but this is not universal across countries. In this paper, we study homeownership decisions among a large and growing segment of the U.S. population: foreign born U.S. residents. We identify a new channel driving immigrants' selection into homeownership, cultural preferences for homeownership. We show that high homeownership in their country of origin (``HOCO'') has an effect on tenure choices for foreign-born U.S. residents: moving across the interquartile range of \textit{HOCO} increases homeownership by 3ppt. We show in a simple tenure choice model how higher cultural affinity can increase homeownership responses to credit supply shocks and test this prediction empirically. Using an exogenous credit shock based on county exposure to lenders that are increasing their mortgage lending nationally, we show that, in response to a 1 SD mortgage credit shock, above-median HOCO residents see an annual increase in their homeownership rate that is 0.2 ppt larger than below-median-HOCO groups. These findings imply that country-of-origin-related preferences can change the impact of credit cycles and policies supporting homeownership which target historically marginalized groups.Discussant(s)
Shantanu Khanna
,
Northeastern University
Caitlin Gorback
,
University of Texas-Austin
Brian C. Cadena
,
University of Colorado Boulder
Edward Coulson
,
University of California-Irvine
JEL Classifications
- R2 - Household Analysis