This paper studies housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. We document market and search activity for the San Francisco Bay Area. Variation within narrow geographic areas is large and differs significantly from variation across those areas. In particular,...

This paper is no longer available on-line from the NBER. A revised version of the paper has been published as "Searching for a Common Factor in Public and Private Real Estate Returns" in the Journal of Portfolio Management JPM RE 2013, Vol. 39, No. 5: pp. 120-133.

We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic rational bubble. We study housing markets in the...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

This paper uses data on house transactions in the state of Massachusetts over the last 20 years to show that houses sold after foreclosure, or close in time to the death or bankruptcy of at least one seller, are sold at lower prices than other houses. Foreclosure discounts are particularly large...

This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...

We study a search and bargaining model of an asset market, where investors’ heterogeneous valuations for the asset are drawn from an arbitrary distribution. Our solution technique renders the analysis fully tractable and allows us to provide a full characterization of the equilibrium, in...

We analyze the role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets subject to search frictions. The publication of a benchmark can, under conditions, raise total social surplus by (i) increasing the volume of beneficial trade, (ii) facilitating more efficient trade matching between dealers and...