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Immigration, Capital Flows and Housing Prices

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  • Andrey Pavlov
  • Tsur Somerville

Abstract

Research on immigration and real estate has found that immigrants lower house prices in immigrant destination neighborhoods. In this article, we find that this latter result is not globally true. Rather, we show that immigrants can raise neighborhood house prices, at least in the case of the wealthy immigrants that we study. We exploit a surprise suspension and subsequent closure of a popular investor immigration program in Canada to use a difference‐in‐differences methodology comparing wealthy immigrant destination census tracts to nondestination tracts. We find that the unexpected suspension of the program had a negative impact on house prices of 1.7–2.6% in the neighborhoods and market segments most favored by the investor immigrants. This leads to an approximate lower bound on the effect of capital inflows of 5%.

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  • Andrey Pavlov & Tsur Somerville, 2020. "Immigration, Capital Flows and Housing Prices," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 48(3), pages 915-949, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:reesec:v:48:y:2020:i:3:p:915-949
    DOI: 10.1111/1540-6229.12267
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    2. Daniel I. García, 2022. "Second‐home buying and the housing boom and bust," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 50(1), pages 33-58, March.
    3. Umut Unal & Bernd Hayo & Isil Erol, 2022. "The Effect of Immigration on the German Housing Market," MAGKS Papers on Economics 202238, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
    4. Tatiana Mocanu & Pedro Tremacoldi‐Rossi, 2023. "The impact of international students on housing markets," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 56(2), pages 647-675, May.
    5. Gunduz, Lokman & Genc, Ismail H. & Aysan, Ahmet Faruk, 2021. "Buying citizenship: A boon to district-level house prices in Istanbul," MPRA Paper 110028, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Lawrence Kryzanowski & Yanting Wu & Tingyu Zhou, 2023. "Conflicts of interest and agent heterogeneity in buyer brokerage," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 51(1), pages 130-169, January.
    7. Morteza Moallemi & Daniel Melser & Xiaoyan Chen & Ashton Silva, 2022. "The Globalization of Local Housing Markets: Immigrants, the Motherland and Housing Prices in Australia," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 103-126, July.

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