Although there are numerous histories of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), there has been little focus on sub-organizations of the FTC. While this history of one sub-organization, the Bureau of Economics, is a description of the role of economists in antitrust and consumer protection, it also...

This paper explores preferences and choices in the real estate market from a personality perspective. First, we employ micro-level data on individual scores on the Big Five personality test and personal financial real estate preferences to evaluate the role of personality in individual real...

Israeli house prices have risen by over 50% over the past three years. In part this reflects the fact that for several years housing construction had not kept pace with increases in the number of households. In response to these developments, hitherto sluggish planning-approval processes are...

There are many events that led up to the financial crisis of 2008. This study looks at the political policies in place before the crisis happened. Focusing on the decade and a half prior to the crisis, the incentives in the financial industry led to risk mitigation. This response to mitigate...

For most households, home ownership is the largest wealth component that has become more accessible through innovation and deregulation in mortgage markets. This paper studies the factors driving home equity withdrawal (HEW) at the household level using Dutch survey data. In the Netherlands,...

A growing literature exploits credit score cutoff rules as a natural experiment to estimate the moral hazard effect of securitization on lender screening. However, these cutoff rules can be traced to underwriting guidelines for originators, not for securitizers. Moreover, loan-level data reveal...

Loan performance of subprime originations during the boom years of 2004–2006 is contrasted with that of subprime originations during the early period of 2000–2002. A counterfactual technique is developed to determine how originations during the early period would perform in a different...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime crisis, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey, representative of the...