Technology has changed how discrimination manifests itself in financial services. Replacing human discretion with algorithms in decision-making roles reduces taste-based discrimination, and new modeling techniques have expanded access to financial services to households who were previously...

Financial economists have debated the impact of dividend taxes on firm valuation for decades, but existing empirical evidence is mixed. In this study, we avoid certain complications inherent in previous empirical work by exploiting institutional characteristics of Real Estate Investment Trusts...

This paper analyzes the pattern of cross-sectional house price appreciation in the Boston metropolitan area from 1982 to 1994. The empirical results are consistent with many of the predictions of a standard urban model in which towns have a fixed set of locational attributes and amenities. In...

Recent research has proposed a pro-cyclical link between sales volume and prices in the real estate market through changes in the equity of existing homeowners. This article uses data from the Boston condominium market to show that owners with high loan-to-value ratios take longer to sell their...

We examine the extent to which uncertainty delays investment and the effect of competition on this relationship using a sample of 1,214 condominium developments in Vancouver, Canada built from 1979-1998. We find that increases in both idiosyncratic and systematic risk lead developers to delay...

Real estate investment trust (REIT) stock prices deviate substantially from net asset values (NAV). Using REIT data since 1990, we find large positive excess returns to a strategy of buying stocks that trade at a discount to NAV, and shorting stocks trading at a premium to NAV. Estimated alphas...

While residents receive similar benefits from many local government programs, only about one-third of all households have children in public schools. We argue that capitalization of school spending into house prices can encourage residents to support spending on schools, even if the residents...

We explore the dynamics of real house prices by estimating serial correlation and mean reversion coefficients from a panel data set of 62 metro areas from 1979-1995. The serial correlation and reversion parameters are then shown to vary cross sectionally with city size, real income growth,...

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously...

This paper explores the practice of mortgage refinancing in a dynamic competitive lending model with risky borrowers and costly default. We show that prepayment penalties improve welfare by ensuring longer-term lending contracts, which prevents the mortgage pools from becoming disproportionately...