Collaborative Proposal: Government, Housing, and the Changing Income Distribution during the Great Depression: A Disaggregated and Microeconomic Approach

该项目对大萧条期间的住房市场、住房金融机构和收入分配的变化进行微观经济研究，使用城市和社区层面的数据面板来分析这些市场如何受到包括联邦、州和地方政府政策在内的各种因素的影响。与大萧条相比，目前对房地产泡沫可能破裂的担忧相形见绌。在20世纪20年代末的房地产热潮之后，一些市场的房地产市场和建设陷入停顿，房价暴跌。只有极少数现代经济学家、经济史学家和20世纪50年代的几位NBER经济学家发表了关于20世纪30年代住房微观经济学的研究。住房特别重要，因为它占家庭资产的很大比例，而抵押贷款通常是家庭所欠债务的主要形式。新政的管理者认为住房是一个主要问题，并建立了几个解决住房问题的计划，包括房主贷款公司(HOLC)和联邦住房管理局(Federal Housing Administration)，前者在1933-1934年间为所有抵押贷款提供20%的再融资，后者开始为抵押贷款提供保险，并为修复和重建提供贷款。这个项目使用一系列面板数据集分析了大萧条期间的房地产市场，我们将根据原始来源和政府文件构建这些数据集。它分析了20世纪20年代和30年代200多个城市的年度建筑许可活动。对于美国所有的县，该项目研究了1930到1940年间美国所有县的住房拥有率、住房价值和租金在7到11个价值范围内的分布变化。在将20世纪30年代中期200多个主要城镇的详细房地产库存信息与1930和1940年的信息进行对比后，该项目调查了从20世纪20年代末到30年代中期的住房拥有率、平均住房价值和租金的下降，以及1939年美国多达200个城市这些价值的回升。该项目基于之前保密的HOLC住房研究，调查了200个城市数千个社区不同质量住房的住房价值的萧条和复苏，重点是社区便利和不便、收入水平以及社区内的种族和民族差异的影响。调查人员使用来自至少22个城市的住房金融调查的回顾信息，追踪了1929-1933年城市间下降的差异如何影响收入分配不同部分的特定家庭群体的收入。研究人员还对更多城市的不同收入范围的家庭比例在1933年至1940年间的变化情况进行了研究。他们使用HOLC对大约200个城市的所有抵押贷款机构进行的调查，分析了该县不同地区提供抵押贷款的机构类型的戏剧性横向差异，以及在20世纪30年代期间它们同意的抵押贷款合同类型和机构角色的变化。整个项目考察了联邦政府项目与州和地方税收和支出项目之间在这些住房市场和收入分配上的相互作用。广泛的影响：该项目拓宽了我们对影响房地产市场的因素的理解，特别是在大萧条中。创建的数据集和发布的记录的.pdf文件副本为其他研究人员提供了大量的公共产品，这些研究人员对这些主题和其他与20世纪30年代有关的主题感兴趣，并希望了解20世纪的长期趋势。

This project performs microeconomic studies of housing markets, housing finance institutions, and changes in the income distribution during the Great Depression using panels of city and neighborhood level data to analyze how these markets were influenced by various factors, including federal, state, and local government policies. Current worries about a possible bursting of a housing bubble pale in comparison to the Great Depression. After a housing boom in the late 1920s, housing markets and construction ground to a halt in some markets and housing values plummeted. Only a handful of modern economists and economic historians and several NBER economists in the 1950s have published studies on the microeconomics of housing during the 1930s. Housing is particularly important because it accounts for a large percentage of household assets and mortgage loans are typically the major form of debt owed by households. The New Deal administrators saw housing as a major concern and established several programs to resolve housing problems, including the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC), which refinanced 20 percent of all mortgages in 1933-1934 and the Federal Housing Administration, which began providing insurance of mortgages and loans for repair and reconstruction. This project analyzes housing markets during the Great Depression using a series of panel data sets that we will construct from original sources and government documents. It analyzes annual building permit activity for over 200 cities in the 1920s and 1930s. For all U.S. counties, it examines changes in the distribution of home ownership, housing values, and rents for 7 to 11 value ranges between the census years 1930 and 1940 for all counties in the U.S. After matching information from detailed property inventories from the mid-1930s for over major 200 cities and towns with the 1930 and 1940 information, the project examines the decline in home ownership rates, average housing values and rents from the late 1920s into the mid-1930s and the recovery in these values in 1939 for up to 200 cities in the United States. Based on formerly confidential HOLC housing studies, the project examines the bust and recovery in housing values for different qualities of housing for thousands of neighborhoods across 200 cities with emphasis on the impact of neighborhood amenities and disamenities, income levels, and racial and ethnic differences across the neighborhoods.The investigators trace how variations in the 1929-1933 decline across cities influenced the incomes of specific groups of households in 1929, 1932, and 1933 in different parts of the income distribution using retrospective information from housing finance surveys in at least 22 cities. The investigators also examine for a larger number of cities how shares of households in different income ranges changed between 1933 and 1940. Using HOLC surveys of all the mortgage lenders in roughly 200 cities, they analyze the dramatic cross-sectional differences in the types of institutions offering mortgages in different parts of the county and the changes in the institutions roles and the types of mortgages contracts that they agreed to during the 1930s. Throughout this project examines the interactions between Federal government programs and state and local taxing and spending programs on these housing markets and on the income distributions.Broader Impact: The project broadens our understanding of the factors that influence housing markets, particularly in Depressions. The datasets created and the .pdf file copies of the records that are posted provide a large public good to other researchers interested in these and other topics related to the 1930s and in discerning long run trends in during the 20th century.