Home equity conversion as presently constituted or proposed usually does not deal well with the potential problem of moral hazard. Once home-owners know that the risk of poor market performance of their homes is borne by investors, they have an incentive to neglect to take steps to maintain the...

Individuals invest in their local environments by volunteering, getting involved in local government, becoming informed about their political leaders, joining non-professional organizations and even gardening. Homeownership may encourage these investments because homeownership gives individuals...

Earlier research has shown that lender income and wealth constraint ratios discourage homeownership. This empirical research has been based on home purchasers using an 80 percent loan-to-value (LTV) fixed-rate conventional loan. Employing the same assumption, we find that the constraints lowered...

Home equity insurance policies, policies insuring homeowners against declines in the price of their homes, would bear some resemblance both to ordinary insurance and to financial hedging vehicles. A menu of choices for the design of such policies is presented here, and conceptual issues are...

Tests of weak-form efficiency of the market for single family homes are performed using data on repeat sales prices of 39,210 individual homes, each for two sales dates. Tests were done for Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco/Oakland for 1970-86. While evidence for seasonality in real...

Owner-occupied housing is said to be favored in the tax code because mortgage interest and property taxes can be deducted in the computation of one's income tax base in spite of the fact that the returns from owner- occupied housing = not taxed. The special tax treatment reduces the user cost of...

Owner-occupied housing receives favorable treatment under current tax law for several reasons. A homeowner's imputed rent is not taxed, and mortgage interest payments are tax deductible. Many past studies have analyzed the effects of these provisions. Inflation's importance in determining the...

Urban economists understand housing prices with a spatial equilibrium approach that assumes people must be indifferent across locations. Since the spatial no arbitrage condition is inherently imprecise, other economists have turned to different no arbitrage conditions, such as the prediction...

We study equilibrium outcomes in markets with asymmetric information about asset values among both buyers and sellers. In residential real estate markets hard-to-observe neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about...

This paper studies an economy inhabited by overlapping generations of homeowners and investors, with the only difference between the two being that homeowners derive utility from housing services whereas investors do not. Tight collateral constraint limits the borrowing capacity of homeowners...