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"Do We Know How Much Our Homes Are Worth? (With Talya Miron-Shatz)", Grace Bucchianeri

Grace Wong Bucchianeri

This paper investigates the self-reported home value, an indicator of housing wealth used in the economic and other literature extensively. Given no observable “true” value of a given home at any given time, we come up with two benchmarks, both based on a market transaction of a specific home. First, we study the gap between a reported home value and the subsequent sales price for around 2,000 retirement-age households across in the US, all of whom have sold a house within one year of self-reporting a home vlaue. We find systematic and significant differences in reported home values from the …