We infer the role of price expectations in forming the U.S. housing boom in the early-2000s from examining housing inventories. We use a reduced form model to show that agents invest in vacant homes when they anticipate prices will increase. Empirically, vacancy can discriminate between price...

This paper documents that the housing cycle, measured by the residential investment share, is a strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictor for the dollar up to twelve quarters. Housing construction is negatively associated with risk premia in equity and bonds, but positively with foreign...