IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v172y2025ics0304405x25001424.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The marginal value of public pension wealth: Evidence from border house prices

Author

Listed:
  • Aiello, Darren
  • Bernstein, Asaf
  • Kargar, Mahyar
  • Lewis, Ryan
  • Schwert, Michael

Abstract

We study how state pension windfalls affect property prices near state borders, where theory suggests real estate reflects the value of additional public resources. Windfalls, representing a source of state revenue about half the size of total taxes, provide economically significant and plausibly exogenous variation in fiscal conditions. We find that each dollar of pension asset returns increases border house prices by approximately two dollars, suggesting that governments allocate additional funds towards high-value projects or tax abatement rather than wasting incremental resources. Evidence of larger effects in financially constrained municipalities highlights how fiscal resources amplify welfare effects of economic shocks.

Suggested Citation

  • Aiello, Darren & Bernstein, Asaf & Kargar, Mahyar & Lewis, Ryan & Schwert, Michael, 2025. "The marginal value of public pension wealth: Evidence from border house prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 172(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:172:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25001424
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104134
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25001424
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104134?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance
    • R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
    • H74 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Borrowing

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:172:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25001424. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.