Urban Mobility
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)
- Chair: Vikram Maheshri, University of Houston
Dust Bowl Migration and Housing in Los Angeles
Abstract
Large in-migration shocks can have important impacts on housing markets in receiving cities. However, when studying the inflow of immigrants from natural disasters, the effects on housing markets can have different dynamics than the typical effects in the case of internal migration. This paper studies the impact of the large-scale in-migration of refugees from the 1930s Dust Bowl in the housing market of Los Angeles. Using a sample of houses linked through the 1930 and 1940 US censuses, we find that houses inhabited by Dust Bowl migrants had lower rents on average relative to other internal migrants in 1940. We show that this difference is not explained by differences in income or neighborhood-level characteristics. We also show suggestive evidence of indirect effects on rents of non-migrant neighbors of Dust Bowl immigrants, but these effects are mostly explained by neighborhood-level characteristics.Why are the Labor Outcomes of Married Women Better in Detroit? The Role of Long and Variable Commutes
Abstract
This paper shows that for college-trained individuals, congestion and related uncertainty about how long a commute may take adversely affects the labor market outcomes of married women. This holds even after controlling for average commute times and other MSA-level attributes (including MSA size). These patterns are also present for both labor force participation (LFP) and the degree to which working individuals with professional training are employed in occupations for which they trained. Evidence affirms that larger MSAs enhance labor market opportunities, consistent with previous literature. New to this paper, average commute time has little effect on labor market outcomes. Instead, it is the volatility of commute times as proxied by rush hour congestion that discourages highly trained women from participating in the workforce, and which reduces the quality of their labor market match for those who are employed.Mortgage Lock-In, Mobility, and Labor Reallocation
Abstract
We study the impact of rising mortgage rates on mobility and labor reallocation. Using individual-level credit record data and variation in the timing of mortgage origination, we show that a 1 p.p. decline in mortgage rate deltas (Δr), measured as the difference between the mortgage rate locked in at purchase and the current market rate, reduces moving rates by 0.68 p.p, or 9%. This effect is economically meaningful and implies that projected rate increases until 2033 will reduce moving by 25%. Moreover, we show that this relationship is nonlinear: once Δr is high enough, households’ alternative of refinancing without moving becomes attractive enough that moving probabilities no longer depend on Δr. Lastly, we find that mortgage lock-in attenuates household responsiveness to shocks to employment opportunities, measured as MSA-level wage growth and instrumented with a shift-share instrument. The responsiveness of moving rates to wage growth is half as large for households who are more locked in (below-median Δr) than for those who are less locked in. We provide causal estimates of mortgage lock-in effects, highlighting unintended consequences of monetary tightening with long-term fixed-rate mortgages on mobility and labor markets.Discussant(s)
Ryan McGregor
,
University of Houston
Caitlin Gorback
,
University of Texas-Austin
Daniel Velasquez-Cabrera
,
University of Michigan
Gary Painter
,
University of Southern California
JEL Classifications
- R2 - Household Analysis
- G2 - Financial Institutions and Services