Borrowing constraints may prevent individual households from buying a home, but do they also reduce the homeownership rate and expand the private rental sector? We develop an empirical strategy that accounts for equilibrium spillovers, based on an assignment model in which investors convert owner-occupied homes into rentals for credit-constrained households. This framework identifies both constrained households and those affected by investment spillovers, allowing quasi-experimental evidence to be interpreted as aggregate effects. Applying the method to Dutch mortgage policy tightenings from 2012 to 2016, we find that borrowing constraints significantly expanded the private rental sector, accounting for up to 75% of its growth through 2017. Our findings imply that borrowing constraints play a central role in shaping tenure outcomes and housing market composition.

This paper studies how new listings affect properties already on the market through the housing search process. I develop a sequential-search model that generates a stock-flow matching pattern and predictions about how congestion varies with entrant characteristics and incumbent listing age. Using detailed micro-level data, I find that a new listing reduces incumbent buyer visits by 15-18% and weekly sale probability by 11-14%, with little effect on list or sale prices. Consistent with the model, congestion is stronger for more price-competitive entrants and recently listed incumbents, and is also larger when properties are closer substitutes and local markets are smaller. The findings support a search-based mechanism in which new listings reshape buyers' search orderings and redistribute matching opportunities across sellers, primarily through the liquidity rather than the price margin.

We study the role of list prices in frictional and segmented housing markets. Using data from a large online housing platform in Beijing, where buyers state their preferred ranges for prices and housing characteristics, we show that list prices position listings into different buyer segments. Exploiting list price revisions in a difference-in-differences design, we find that both downward and upward revisions attract buyers from other segments. Downward revisions increase visitor flows persistently, leading to faster sales at lower prices, while upward revisions generate short-lived interest, higher sale probability, and higher transaction prices. We develop a search model with segmentation and time-consuming inspections that rationalizes these patterns and explains under what conditions sellers may want to change their list price.

This paper examines how a county’s first IPO affects local entrepreneurial activity in China. Using a county-level panel spanning 1990–2022 and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that a county’s first IPO reduces both new firm registrations and the stock of active firms by approximately 8%, while having no significant effect on firm exit. The decline in entry is concentrated among private firms and firms operating in the same industry as the IPO firm. Moreover, the effect is stronger following IPOs by firms with larger employment, but does not vary with either their capital or local access to finance, pointing to labor market reallocation as the primary mechanism. Consistent with this interpretation, the negative effect is more pronounced for state-owned enterprise IPOs and in less-developed regions, where competition for local labor is likely to be stronger. These findings show that IPOs can crowd out, rather than stimulate, local entrepreneurial activity, highlighting an important local resource reallocation effect of public listings.