Abstract A stable electricity supply is critical to high‐rise cities. This article studies how electricity supply uncertainty, triggered by Taiwan's 2017 power crisis, affects housing prices and migration in a densely populated, high‐rise urban area. The crisis involved 2 weeks of electricity rationing followed by the August 15 large‐scale blackout that affected nearly six million households. Using within‐building comparisons across floors, we find that the power crisis led to a persistent decline in the relative value of upper floor housing units. We interpret this as a revaluation of electricity reliability, as the crisis revealed larger than expected outage costs for upper floor units that depend more heavily on elevators and other electricity‐powered systems. The effects vary with households’ adaptation capacity and infrastructure resilience. We also find reduced in‐migration and slower taxable‐income growth in low‐income, high‐rise neighborhoods, suggesting that unreliable electricity supply can reshape residential sorting and reinforce spatial inequality.
This article investigates gender differences in workload choices, job outcomes, and the trade-off between wage and time costs in the financial services industry, where many occupations offer great flexibility and involve overlapping workload and complex job dynamics. Using granular data from real estate brokerage, we find that women appear to handle fewer listings than men and these differences are pronounced among agents likely to face tighter nonmarket time constraints. Yet women are not less capable than men of handling additional workload: conditional on the same starting pipeline and a rich set of controls, female agents are similarly responsive in acquiring new listings and more responsive in converting existing listings into sales. We further show that women face a less favorable realized commission-time trade-off when workload expands. Although female agents obtain larger marginal commission gains from an additional active listing, they also incur disproportionately larger marginal time costs. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that, at the sample mean workload, the realized commission-time trade-off is about 15.38% less favorable for women than for men. The results suggest that lower female workload reflects both tighter nonmarket time constraints and less favorable returns to scaling workload.
This paper provides causal evidence on the reaction of housing market participants to information shocks regarding a complex policy scheme affecting the future user cost of housing. We study the capitalization of large future land rent increases into transaction prices of residential units located on leasehold land in Helsinki, Finland. The policy announcement of land rent renewals creates a quasi-experimental setting, allowing us to investigate the capitalization dynamics over a period of 14 years. The leasehold discount increase is substantially slower than predicted by the present value model, implying only partial adjustment over the short run, but is in line with full capitalization eventually. We further investigate the mechanism behind the sluggish price adjustment.
We examine the salience of neighborhood labels on housing demand using the unanticipated removal of a field that defines geographic area boundaries in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) property search platform as a natural experiment. These labels plausibly reflect historical boundaries associated with past redlining practices. Applied to the rental market, we show that removing the ability to filter property listings using these MLS labels increased rents in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods more than in predominantly White neighborhoods. The label removal effect is more pronounced at the peripheries of neighborhoods, where the boundaries between neighborhoods are not clearly defined. Furthermore, we show that minority neighborhoods were able to attract and retain more households after label removal, suggesting that decoupling property locations from their historical labels shifted housing demand to areas previously constrained by these labels.
This study examines how administrative jurisdictional reform affects land market dynamics by analyzing the 2023 incorporation of Gunwi County into Daegu Metropolitan City, South Korea. We develop a supply-and-demand framework in which administrative reclassification raises expectations of future development and increases landowners' reservation prices, while the contemporaneous Land Transaction Permission System restricts speculative demand after the actual implementation. Exploiting the sequential timing of the reform, we distinguish the announcement period from the implementation period and estimate difference-in-differences models using transaction-level land market data from 2018 to 2024. The results show that both land prices and transaction activity increased after the announcement, whereas prices continued to rise but transaction volumes declined after the implementation. This pattern is consistent with an initial demand expansion followed by a supply-side contraction driven by higher expected future land values, a supply-side response that can be identified independently of the demand-restricting effects of the LTPS. The price effects are substantially larger in urban-designated zones, lower-priced urban parcels, and parcels closer to local central business districts, where future development is more plausible. Robustness checks using alternative control groups, detailed parcel characteristics, regional controls, and compositional analyses support this interpretation. The findings show that administrative restructuring can reshape land markets by altering forward-looking expectations, with implications for zoning, land-use planning, and speculative market management.
