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Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances

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Abstract

This paper tests the effectiveness of vacant property registration ordinances (VPROs) in reducing negative externalities from foreclosures. VPROs were widely adopted by local governments across the United States during the foreclosure crisis and facilitated the monitoring and enforcement of existing property maintenance laws. We implement a border discontinuity design combined with a triple-difference specification to overcome policy endogeneity concerns, and we find that the enactment of VPROs in Florida more than halved the negative externality from foreclosure. This finding is robust to a rich set of time-by-location fixed effects, limiting the sample to properties within 0.1 miles of a VPRO/non-VPRO border and to a number of other sample restrictions and falsification exercises. The results suggest that an important driver of the negative price effect of nearby foreclosures is a non-pecuniary externality where the failure to maintain or secure a property affects one's neighbors.

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  • Arnab Biswas & Chris Cunningham & Kristopher Gerardi & Daniel Sexton, 2019. "Foreclosure Externalities and Vacant Property Registration Ordinances," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2019-20, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2019-20
    DOI: 10.29338/wp2019-20
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    1. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi & Francesco Trebbi, 2015. "Foreclosures, House Prices, and the Real Economy," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(6), pages 2587-2634, December.
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    Cited by:

    1. Geoffrey K. Turnbull & Arno J. van der Vlist, 2023. "After the Boom: Transitory and Legacy Effects of Foreclosures," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 66(2), pages 422-442, February.
    2. Lauren Lambie‐Hanson & Wenli Li & Michael Slonkosky, 2022. "Real estate investors and the U.S. housing recovery," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 50(6), pages 1425-1461, November.
    3. Blanco, Hector, 2023. "Pecuniary effects of public housing demolitions: Evidence from Chicago," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    foreclosures; policy; externality; vacancy; mortgage defaults; diversity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
    • K25 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Real Estate Law
    • R28 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Government Policy
    • R52 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Land Use and Other Regulations

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