In housing markets with asymmetric information list prices may signal unobserved properties of the house or the seller. Asymmetric information is the starting point of many models for the housing market. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of list-price reductions to test for the...

A house is a bundle comprising a physical structure and the plot of land upon which the house is built. Thus changes in house prices reflect changes in the cost of structures and value of land. In this paper we apply this insight to construct the first constant-quality price and quantity indexes...

We develop an OLG model aimed at explaining the joint determination of housing prices, rents, and interest rates, in an environment featuring a positive home ownership bias and individual borrowing limits that generate a mismatch between desired and available funds to finance housing purchases....

Housing transactions by owner-occupiers take two steps, purchase of a new property and sale of the old housing unit. This paper shows how the transaction sequence decision of owner-occupiers depends on, and in turn, affects housing market conditions in an equilibrium search-and-matching model of...

Using data on house sales and inventories of unsold houses, this paper shows that changes in sales volume are largely explained by changes in the frequency at which houses are put up for sale rather than changes in the length of time taken to sell them. Thus the decision to move house is key to...

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent...

Housing transactions by existing homeowners take two steps, a purchase of a new property and sale of the old housing unit. These two decisions are not independent, and their sequence may depend on the state of the housing market. This paper shows how the sequence of buyer-seller decisions...

To understand the effects of regulation on mortgage risk, it is instructive to track the history of regulatory changes in a country rather than to rely entirely on cross-country evidence that can be contaminated by unobserved heterogeneity. However, in developed countries with fairly stable...

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

This paper evaluates the macroeconomic and distributional effects of government bailout guarantees for Government Sponsored Enterprises (such as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac) in the mortgage market. In order to do so we construct a model with heterogeneous, infinitely lived households and...