Unaffordable housing and local employment growth: Evidence from California municipalities

Ritashree Chakrabarti and Junfu Zhang
Additional contact information
Ritashree Chakrabarti: IHS Global Insight, USA

Urban Studies, 2015, vol. 52, issue 6, 1134-1151

Abstract: It is widely believed that unaffordable housing could drive businesses away and thus impede job growth. However, there is little evidence to support this view. This paper presents a simple model to clarify how housing affordability is linked to employment growth and why unaffordable housing could negatively affect employment growth. The paper then investigates this effect empirically using data on California municipalities. For various reasons, a simple correlation between unaffordable housing and employment growth cannot be interpreted as causal. Several empirical strategies are employed to identify the causal effect of unaffordable housing on employment growth. The estimation results provide consistent evidence that unaffordable housing indeed slows local employment growth.

Keywords: amenity; California; employment growth; housing affordability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098014532854 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Unaffordable Housing and Local Employment Growth: Evidence from California Municipalities (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:52:y:2015:i:6:p:1134-1151

DOI: 10.1177/0042098014532854

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().