About the talk:

Expansionary corporate events can strengthen local housing demand, but they may also induce credit reallocation from households to firms. We study the impact of this tension on housing markets using leveraged buyouts (LBOs), which generate immediate corporate financing needs but affect home purchasing power only gradually. Using U.S. county-level data and a stacked difference-in-differences design, we find that LBO activity lowers the annual house price growth rate by 3–14% in three years. Local bank lending shifts toward businesses and mortgage denial rates rise, corroborating the credit reallocation mechanism. The effects are stronger for more constrained banks, larger buyouts, in more concentrated banking markets, and in counties with more volatile house prices. The results show that housing market responses to corporate activity depend on the balance between demand spillovers and credit-reallocation forces.

About the speaker:

Dr Wan is a senior lecturer at the Department of Banking and Finance in Monash Business School. His research interests include real estate finance, urban economics, and machine learning. His work has been published in leading finance and real estate journals, such as Management Science, Review of Finance, Nature Climate Change, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Real Estate Economics. Dr Wan received the PhD degree in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge.