Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

We explore the determinants of the international pattern of home ownership using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), a collection of microeconomic data on fourteen OECD countries. In most, the cross-section is repeated over time and includes several demographic variables carefully matched between...

This Paper analyses the effects of residential property holdings on optimal investment portfolios. Using a mean-variance framework, we show that residential real estate offers significant diversification benefits relative to investments in stocks and bonds for US investors. Risk averse investors...