A capital influx into local housing markets would be expected to increase house prices, but the spillover effect onto rental prices is theoretically ambiguous. I estimate both price impacts in U.S. residential housing markets using data from a boom in real estate purchases by buyers from China, which amounted to $200 billion of purchases made between 2010 and 2019. Using a novel method to measure these purchases and an instrumental variable for where purchases are made, I find a large positive house price impact. Consistent with investment q-theory, rents fall as constructions rise, especially in areas with elastic housing supply.

We provide observational evidence that climate risks impacted economic behavior earlier and more significantly than conventional discourse and research suggests. Using a novel dataset with residential property-level measures of climate risk exposures, we document a significant association between climate risks and house prices and ownership patterns as early as 2006. Within a census tract, and using a repeat-sales design with controls for time-varying fundamental demand, one percent of extra expected future climate losses is associated to a 2-4% permanent price discount to a house, far larger than the frictionless rational expectations benchmark. Mimicking the timing of this price pattern, the buyers of climate-riskier properties shifted from owner-occupants to landlords/investors, and from high-leverage borrowers to low-leverage borrowers, suggesting a potential role for risk-sharing or financial constraints.

We argue that a long-term low interest rate environment can cause labor income inequality, the emergence of the working rich, and reduced intergenerational mobility. We provide a simple model with endogenous human capital accumulation and credit constraints to demonstrate this causal link. The mechanism operates through a tilting of the human capital gradient: wealthy households, more so than poor households, will increase human capital investment in response to low rates. Normatively, these tilting responses to low rates are inefficient, but higher capital taxes is not an ideal response. We find empirical support for our tilting mechanism over the last 60 years in the US. Quantitatively, we show that the endogenous human capital investment response to low interest rates can account for a 17% rise in cross-sectional labor income variance (higher inequality) and a 7% higher parent-child labor income inter-generational elasticity (lower mobility).

We estimate intergenerational elasticities (IGEs) of housing consumption and income for the United States. The one–generation housing–consumption IGE is 0.73, exceeding the income IGE of 0.52. Using Engel curves, we map housing to total consumption and infer a total–consumption IGE of 0.72. Consumption persistence varies systematically: higher for White than for Black Americans and higher in the Northeast than in the South, reversing canonical earnings patterns. Mobility is substantially lower when measured through consumption than through income.

We study the effect of racial minority bank ownership on minority credit access. Using new data for 87 million minority borrowers, we present four main findings. First, minority-owned banks specialize in same-race mortgage lending. Over 70 percent of their mortgages go to borrowers of bank owners' same race. Second, the effect of minority bank ownership on minority credit is large and exceeds that of minority loan officers. We find that minority borrowers applying for mortgages in banks whose owners are of the same minority group are nine percentage points more likely to be approved than minority borrowers in non-minority banks. This effect is over six times that of a minority loan officer. Third, the default rate of minority banks' same-race borrowers is much lower than that of otherwise-identical borrowers of other races, and Asian banks drive this difference. Fourth, evidence from plausibly exogenous bank collapses suggests that the effect of Asian bank ownership might reflect an expansion rather than a reallocation of credit to Asian borrowers. Our findings are consistent with minority bank ownership reducing information frictions and improving credit allocations.