IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2609.21478.html

Bricks or Cash? Externalities of Housing Upgrading in High-density Cities

Author

Listed:
  • Sumit Agarwal
  • Ying Deng
  • Yi Fan
  • Qi Gao
  • Jing Li
  • Lin Ma

Abstract

We estimate housing externalities in a high-density city, exploiting the staggered rollout of Singapore's nationwide Main Upgrading Programme for public housing. Controlling for nonrandom neighborhood exposure, we find that upgrading raises treated buildings' prices by 11.5% upon completion and neighboring buildings' resale prices by about 2% within 500 meters, decaying to zero beyond. A model with distance-decaying externalities shows that in dense settings spillovers justify the distortions of in-kind provision; this advantage diminishes and reverses at lower densities. Administrative data on over 2 million residents show that upgrading disproportionately retains older incumbents, suggesting age-specific amenities as an underexplored externality channel.

Suggested Citation

  • Sumit Agarwal & Ying Deng & Yi Fan & Qi Gao & Jing Li & Lin Ma, 2026. "Bricks or Cash? Externalities of Housing Upgrading in High-density Cities," Papers 2609.21478, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2609.21478
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.21478
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    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:arx:papers:2609.21478. 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: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arxiv.org/ .

    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.