Essays on Housing Economics and Family Dynamics
Ranosova, Tereza
2023
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on two of the biggest kinds of long-term decisions in one's life, on housing and on marriage. In all three chapters I focus on previously unexplored aggregate implications of simple differences between the incentives faced by different demographic groups. In Chapter I "Commuting and the value of marriage" I combine motivating evidence with a structural model to show that even though long commutes are particularly detrimental to married women's labor market outcomes, in terms of welfare it is singles who lose the most. First, I show that the gender gap in commuting among singles is negligible. Second, men in couples (not women) have much longer commutes than single men, and job access alone cannot explain this difference. This together with other observations suggests that commuting features gains from specialization harnessed within couples, allowing men to take better jobs. I embed this feature in a quantitative spatial model with endogenous marriage and location choices that successfully captures the commuting and location patterns by marital status. In a joint housing and marriage market equilibrium, as metro areas sprawl, commuting increases most for men in couples and employment falls most for women in couples, contributing to gender gaps in both outcomes. However, in terms of welfare singles lose more than couples, increasing the value of marriage. Couples are able to partially evade commuting costs through specialization, lower housing costs and redistributing resources within the household. Chapter II "Did the baby boom cause the US divorce boom?" shows that the two major demographic 'booms' that the United States experienced during the second half of the twentieth century, in births after the second world war and in divorces 25 years later are linked. As the baby-boom generations were entering marriageable age, men in previous cohorts were faced with exceptionally good remarriage prospects motivating them to rematch. First, I show that cohorts who ultimately divorced most were the ones with the biggest increase in remarriage opportunities for men. Second, using cross-state variation in the size of the baby-boom, I show that marriages in the pre-boom generations were more likely to divorce the bigger the relative supply of young women (instrumenting the size of the baby-boom with WWII mobilization rates). Lastly, I construct a simple dynamic marriage market model which can generate a divorce boom caused by a baby-boom and can account for between a seventh and a third of the rise in divorces in the 1970s. In Chapter III "Housing market channel of monetary policy: the role of residents in their 50s" I provide empirical evidence that the effect of monetary policy shocks, identified through high-frequency event studies, on housing prices depends on the age-structure of the economy in a non-trivial way. Both across U.S. metro areas and across states, local housing prices drop more after monetary policy tightens whenever the share of population between 50 and 65 years of age is higher. A stronger investment motive in the demand for housing by this age group is a possible mechanism. This differential reaction of housing prices is already detectable by the quarter of the shock and is followed by a differential response in employment starting about four quarters after the shock.Deep Blue DOI
Subjects
Housing Economics Marriage and Divorce Monetary Policy Commuting
Types
Thesis
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
Remediation of Harmful Language
The University of Michigan Library aims to describe library materials in a way that respects the people and communities who create, use, and are represented in our collections. Report harmful or offensive language in catalog records, finding aids, or elsewhere in our collections anonymously through our metadata feedback form. More information at Remediation of Harmful Language.
Accessibility
If you are unable to use this file in its current format, please select the Contact Us link and we can modify it to make it more accessible to you.