Michael Klien

New paper (w/ Jon Gruber): What’s a building permit worth? And what can we learn about the importance of de-facto regulatory burdens versus de-jure constraints in housing development? We study these questions using a new setting: the market for land with preapproved permits.

"It cost $75 to put a home on realestate.com.au back in 2009 – it’s now as much as $6000, depending on the suburb." Might explain why Costar is so interested in portals in the U.S. afr.com/companies/medi…

What led to the baby boom? Angelova and @leonardo_damico find a 300 bps spread in mortgage rates across cities in 1930, which converged to <100 bps in 1940 as the result of federal mortgage expansion Led to rise in fertility. cc @DKThomp @lymanstoneky leonardodamico.github.io/papers/angelov…

The Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter autonomously draws construction plans onto concrete.

Inventory is all that matters in the current housing market. If a market has an inventory surplus, then prices are becoming more affordable (Austin, Tampa). If a market has a shortage, then prices are getting more expensive (Chicago, New York). Getting more homes on the market should be the first thing we focus on as a country if we want to address the national housing crisis.

The flow of new research finding that zoning makes housing expensive continues, getting broader and very detailed. A state-of-the-art paper by @vincent_rollet . 1/5 vrollet.github.io/files/city_str…

The universal symbol of progress

The opportunity costs of parenting have increased because there are so many other fun, exciting things you could be doing. So this isn’t just about financial affordability (though that may be important) But also trade-offs in YOUR TIME USE.

The Representative Agent is all you need?

#WIFOMonatsberichte: Für 2025 bleiben die Aussichten für die österreichische Bauwirtschaft verhalten; erst ab 2026 wird sowohl in 🇦🇹 als auch auf europäischer Ebene mit stärkeren Zuwächsen gerechnet. @KlienMichael buff.ly/4zXqAH8

Some new surprising facts about nightlights have just been uncovered. These will impact how we use nightlights to measure economic growth. Here's the breakdown:

If we want more than a bandaid on the housing crisis, the next increment of development should be legalized by right in every neighborhood across North America. ✍️: Andrew Price

Featured in the latest Digest: "The Stagnation of US Construction Productivity" nber.org/202502/digest/…

Trade shocks lead to loss in manufacturing jobs, but new workers enter service jobs, so total employment is similar. These service jobs generally pay less, leading to overall income losses. And displaced manufacturing workers are stuck in place in declining communities.

Admitting that public participation in planning does more harm than good is one of the biggest taboos in the field. The 1970s participatory governance framework that we're stuck with has completely wrecked American cities and yet if you mildly criticize it you're a heretic

Give people housing and they'll have kids! Obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20 to 25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%.

Excited to share insights from @the_IDB Economists Network Seminar! Michel Peter (Yale University) presented his paper Spatial Structural Change, exploring how local economic development intersects with aggregate structural change in the U.S. economy (1880–1920). 🧵 1/7

NEW PUBLICATION: “Understanding the Drivers of Transit Construction Costs in Canada” in @UofTCities @CANURB The first from me, Balthazar Crane, @ChittiMarco, and @Amer0204 So why are transit projects so expensive in Canada? Here’s what we found: 1/🧵 stateofcitiessummit.ca/files/041224_U…

Real Estate and Macroeconomics "In 2007, Edward Leamer, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, pointed out the high costs of this neglect by arguing that it’s meaningless to try to understand business cycles without paying attention to the housing sector. As he argued in a now-famous paper titled “Housing IS the Business Cycle,” the housing market is central to understanding why economies go through booms and busts. He pointed out that nearly all recessions in the United States since World War II were preceded by problems in the housing sector." "Central banks faced the challenge of figuring out how the increases in interest rates that they were engineering to subdue inflation would affect the housing sector and the economy overall. This is no easy task. The channels through which interest rates affect housing markets are complicated and shift over time—they require a study of housing markets with a depth of knowledge that would be rare in macroeconomics textbooks, just as Leamer noted almost two decades ago, when he lamented his failure to find a single textbook that placed real estate “front and center, where it belongs.”" "Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s mostly rich countries, house prices have risen by almost 40 percent in real terms over the past decade, with the cost of a home in the United States up by about 50 percent." imf.org/en/Publication…