In this paper, we modeled several types of housing transitions of the elderly in two countries -- Britain and the United States. One important form of these transitions involves downsizing of housing consumption, the importance of which among older households is still debated. This downsizing...

This paper investigates the effects of spatial housing price risk on housing choices over the first half of the life-cycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, most people want to eventually own their home thereby creating an insurance...

We have described the relationship between family attributes and moving, and between moving and change in housing wealth. Moving is often associated with retirement and with precipitating shocks like the death of a spouse or by other changes in marital status. Median housing wealth increases as...

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

We use exogenously determined, long-distance relocations of U.S. Army soldiers to investigate the impact of moving on marriage. We find that marriage rates increase sharply around the time of a move in an event study analysis. Reduced form exposure analysis reveals that an additional move over a...

How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we build a new administrative dataset which links individual employment and entrepreneur tax records to TransUnion credit reports, and we exploit the discrete increase in consumer credit...

Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the sharp rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in...

We use Census micro data to shed new light on how growth in house prices boosts US entrepreneurship. At the height of the 2007 real estate boom, 5% of self-employed individuals and 12% of employer-businesses used home equity to partly or wholly finance a new business. Despite this frequency,...