Conference Agenda

This study uses contextual analysis to explain the effects of media coverage on immigrant homeownership in the United States. The creation, sharing, and exchange of information over networks and virtual communities among immigrants and local natives are facilitated by media coverage of the housing market, but there are significant differences across ethnic groups and generations in their preferred media outlet's country of origin. We document that: a) first-generation Asian immigrants are influenced by positive housing news from the media in their country of origin, whereas second-generation Asian immigrants rely more on local housing news from U.S.-based media sources; and b) first-generation African and Hispanic immigrants rely on positive housing news from both the US and their country of origin to make house purchase decisions. The result is robust after we adopted an exogenous shock to media coverage measured by nationwide media strikes. Education, employment, and income are all channels that influence the geographic origin of one's preferred source of media. Positive local housing-related news from U.S.-based media outlets has a greater impact on well-educated and/or high-income immigrants than on less educated and/or lower-income earning immigrant peers. Similarly, employed immigrants are more likely than unemployed immigrants to be affected by housing news disseminated by U.S. media outlets. This paper offers novel insights into information assimilation and immigrant homeownership in the United States.

The purpose of this study is to examine how interest rates and migration affect changes in housing prices in Jeju Province, South Korea, using the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index and VAR (Vector Autoregressive) models. Jeju Province experienced a rapid increase in housing prices from 2012 to 2017, and there were arguments that the significant rise was attributable to the annual influx of 10,000 people during that period. In 2010, Jeju's population was around 571,000, and it has been steadily increasing by over 10,000 people each year, reaching about 667,000 in 2017. Notably, from 2014 to 2016, the population increased by 20,000 people per year. As of 2022, the population has grown to approximately 678,000. While some argued that the surge in housing prices during the 2012-2017 period was due to the annual population influx, others claimed that it was largely driven by the low interest rate policy at that time. However, as of 2023, the population growth has slowed down, and the low interest rate policy has been replaced by a high interest rate policy since 2021. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the causes of apartment price fluctuations in Jeju from 2007 to 2022 using apartment transaction data, focusing on two variables, population and interest rates. Since existing indices for Jeju are not regionally differentiated, this study develop a S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index using actual apartment transaction data instead of commonly used indices like Kookmin Bank's Housing Price Index(KB-HPI) or the Housing Price Index from the National Survey of House Price Trends, or the Statistics of Real Estate Transaction Situation of Korean Real Estate Board(REB). This approach will provide more regionally differentiated insights than existing indices. Given that 70% of Jeju's population is concentrated in the urban area of Jeju City, analyzing the province as a whole could lead to biased results that fail to account for disparities across different regions. This study will divide Jeju into four regions and create a repeat sales index for each region. VAR models will be constructed for each region and the effects of population changes and interest rate fluctuations will be distinguished through variance decomposition.

This study provides evidence of the causal impact of immigration on German house prices, flat prices, and flat rents using an extensive dataset covering 382 administrative districts over the period 2004−2020. Employing a panel-data approach and a manually constructed shift-share instrument, we show that international migration has a significantly positive short-term effect on German flat prices and rents. House prices are not significantly affected. We estimate that an increase in international migration of 1% of the initial district population causes a hike in flat prices of up to 3% as well as a hike in flat rents of about 1%. The increase in flat prices is more than twice as high as this at the lower end of the market, whereas the flat rental market demonstrates a more linear response. We also discover that immigration’s impact on flat prices and rents does not significantly differ across rural and urban areas within the country.