This paper studies the effects of private real estate collateral on entrepreneurial lending and entrepreneurial activity in the Netherlands. The residential collateral channel is especially relevant for sole-proprietors who own a business with unlimited liability. We used administrative data on...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

This paper analyzes savings and asset holdings of immigrants in relation to their return plans. We argue that savings and asset accumulation may be affected by return plans of immigrants. Further, the way savings and assets are held in the home- and host country may also be related to future...

In Chinese cities, migrants with rural hukou, compared to residents with local urban hukou, face more uncertainty, have limited access to mortgage finance, and are less eligible for low-cost housing. A simple model demonstrates that for these reasons, rural- to-urban migrants are less likely to...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...

I create a time series of weekly ratios of Google searches, in the US, on buying and selling in the Real Estate Category of Google Trends. I call this ratio the Google US Housing Market BUSE Index or simply the BUSE index. It expresses the number of "buy"-searches for each "sell"-search which,...

This paper examines the effect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in home-value appreciation in Australia. Specifically, immigrant homeowners experienced a 41.7 percent increase in median home values between 2001 and 2006, while the median value of housing owned by the native-born...

Trusting behavior has been shown to affect households' portfolio choice between risky and risk-free financial assets. We extend the analysis of the effect of trust on portfolio choice to include the dominant component of households' portfolios, real estate. In a simple model, we show how the...

This paper investigates the effects of housing price risk on housing choices over the life-cycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, the fact that most people will eventually own their home creates an insurance demand for housing assets...