How can mortgages be redesigned to reduce housing market volatility, consumption volatility, and default? How does mortgage design interact with monetary policy? We answer these questions using a quantitative equilibrium life cycle model with aggregate shocks, long-term mortgages, and an...

We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to...

A busy airport's closure has large effects on noise, real estate markets, and neighborhood demographics. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver's Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but...

We document the existence of a racial gap in realized housing returns that is an order of magnitude larger than disparities arising from housing costs alone, and is driven almost entirely by differences in distressed home sales (i.e. foreclosures and short sales). Black and Hispanic homeowners...

With "2020 hindsight," the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but rather a boom- bust-rebound at both the national level and across cities. We argue this pattern reflects a larger role for fundamentally-rooted explanations than previously thought. We construct a city-level long-run...

By constraining an individual's choice during a search, housing discrimination distorts sorting decisions away from true preferences and results in a ceteris paribus reduction in welfare. This study combines a large-scale field experiment with a residential sorting model to derive...

Using bi-weekly snapshots of Zillow in three US cities, we document how home sellers and buyers interact with Zillow's Zestimate algorithm during the sales cycle of residential properties. We find that listing and selling outcomes respond significantly to Zestimate, and Zestimate is quickly...

We provide the first evidence that spatial variation in all-cause mortality risk is capitalized into US housing prices. Using a hedonic framework, we recover the annual implicit cost of a 0.1 percentage-point reduction in mortality risk among older Americans and find that this figure is both...

We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of...

Equity in housing is a major component of household wealth in the United States. Steady gains in housing prices over the last several decades have generated large potential gains in household wealth among homeowners. Mankiw and Weil (1989) and McFadden (1993b) have argued that the aging of the...