Supply Elasticity and the Housing Cycle of the 2000s

There is no evidence that differences in supply elasticity caused cross‐sectional variation among U.S. housing markets in the severity of the 2000s housing cycle. This is true in three sets of empirical specifications: a first that assumes identical demand changes in the 2000s across markets, a second that proxies for supply elasticity and demand changes in the 2000s with estimates based on price and quantity changes in the 1980s and a third that uses physical and regulatory constraints to proxy for supply elasticity and uses state fixed effects to capture variation in demand conditions.