Even though the top marginal income tax rate has fallen substantially and the tax code has become less progressive since 1979, the tax benefit to homeowners was virtually unchanged between 1979-1989, and then rose substantially between 1989-1999. Using tract-level data from the 1980, 1990, and...

Oswald hypothesizes that regions and countries with high homeownership rates will experience higher natural rates of unemployment and that rising homeownership in OECD countries since the 1960s provides a key explanation for the rise in the natural rate of unemployment over the same time period....

Health, wealth and where one lives are important, if not the three most important material living conditions. There are many mechanisms that suggest that living arrangements and well-being derived from health and economic status are closely related. This paper investigates the joint evolution of...

We develop a new approach to measuring changes in consumer welfare due to changes in the price of owner-occupied housing. In our approach, an agent's welfare adjustment is defined as the transfer required to keep expected discounted utility constant given a change in current home prices. We...

This paper provides an in-depth review and analysis of household portfolios in Japan. (1) Using both aggregate and disaggregate data, it is shown that the shares of equities in household financial wealth have been decreasing throughout the 1990s. Stock market participations of Japanese...

Many people assume that the most significant risk in the housing market is that homeowners are exposed to fluctuations in house values. However, homeownership also provides a hedge against fluctuations in future rent payments. This paper finds that, even though house price risk endogenously...

This paper analyzes the importance of household perceptions of house price risk in explaining homeownership choice. While a majority of US households (71%) believes that housing is a "safe" investment, renters are much more likely to perceive housing as risky. Risk perceptions vary across...

Since 1970, housing's relative price, share of expenditure, and ``unaffordability'' have all grown. We estimate housing demand using a novel compensated framework over space and an uncompensated framework over time. Our specifications pass tests imposed by rationality and household mobility....

This chapter reviews empirical estimates of differential income and consumption growth across individuals during recessions. Most existing studies examine the variation in income and consumption growth across individuals by sorting on ex ante or contemporaneous income or consumption levels. We...

This paper investigates the effects of spatial housing price risk on housing choices over the first half of the life-cycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, most people want to eventually own their home thereby creating an insurance...