Agorastos, David
(2024)
Essays on Housing and Consumer Finance.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays that contribute to the fields of housing economics, financial economics, and consumer finance. Chapter 1 charts the evolution of housing prices in American cities across the twentieth century. We use hedonic methods to construct annual market price indices for both rented and owned housing at both the national and city levels from 1890 to 2006. Using these indices, we document several new facts about housing markets, including, the relationship between housing market cycles and business cycles, the city- and national-level return to owning housing, the implications of a revised CPI on the standard of living, and the relationship between changes in housing prices and supply constraints. Chapter 2 combines hedonic pricing, machine learning, and text analysis methods to improve the predictive power of hedonic pricing models and reduce bias in hedonic indices. I use machine learning methods to select features from a novel geocoded, tabular dataset which I include as controls in hedonic pricing models to construct market price indices for both rented and owned housing at the city and sub-city levels for San Francisco from 1890 to 2006. Using these data and indices, I document the total return to owning housing at both the city and sub-city levels and dynamically compare the variance of sales price residuals within neighborhoods of San Francisco and across cities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Chapter 3 studies how the terms of consumer debt contracts affect nonpayment decisions of financially distressed borrowers. Using a proprietary credit report panel, we document that a substantial subset of financially distressed borrowers who hold a varied debt portfolio avoid defaulting on revolving credit, at the cost of an increased likelihood of future student loan default. We complement this finding with a survey that investigates the mechanism underlying these nonpayment decisions. We find that participants rank the timing of default as the most influential factor and link it to a low level of financial literacy for student loan default consequences.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
5 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
17 May 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
5 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
4 August 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
188 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Economics |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
economics, housing, consumer finance |
| Date Deposited: |
06 Aug 2024 02:08 |
| Last Modified: |
06 Aug 2024 02:08 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46828 |
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