Home equity insurance policies, policies insuring homeowners against declines in the price of their homes, would bear some resemblance both to ordinary insurance and to financial hedging vehicles. A menu of choices for the design of such policies is presented here, and conceptual issues are...

We study equilibrium outcomes in markets with asymmetric information about asset values among both buyers and sellers. In residential real estate markets hard-to-observe neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about...

Using data on exogenous liquidity losses generated by the fraud and failure of a cash-in-transit firm, we demonstrate a causal impact on firms' trade credit usage. We find that firms manage liquidity shortfalls by increasing the amount of drawn credit from suppliers and decreasing the amount...

This paper studies the economic benefits of home ownership. Exploiting a quasi-experiment surrounding privatization decisions of municipally-owned apartment buildings, we obtain random variation in home ownership for otherwise similar buildings with similar tenants. We link the tenants to their...

We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past 25 years and a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the 1980s and 1990s. We impute the aggregate...

This paper studies an economy inhabited by overlapping generations of homeowners and investors, with the only difference between the two being that homeowners derive utility from housing services whereas investors do not. Tight collateral constraint limits the borrowing capacity of homeowners...

Urban economists understand housing prices with a spatial equilibrium approach that assumes people must be indifferent across locations. Since the spatial no arbitrage condition is inherently imprecise, other economists have turned to different no arbitrage conditions, such as the prediction...

Owner-occupied housing is said to be favored in the tax code because mortgage interest and property taxes can be deducted in the computation of one's income tax base in spite of the fact that the returns from owner- occupied housing = not taxed. The special tax treatment reduces the user cost of...