The real economic cost of homeownership depends on an intricate system of taxes and subsides that vary over time and across the United States. We incorporate the key features of this system into a framework for measuring the annual user-cost of housing and we use it to document how housing costs...

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...

Climate change presents new risks for property in the United States. Due to the high cost and sometimes unavailability of location-specific property risk data, home buyers can greatly benefit from acquiring knowledge about these risks. To explore this, a large-scale nationwide natural field...

We provide novel estimates of the timing, magnitudes, and potential determinants of the start of the last housing boom across American neighborhoods and metropolitan areas (MSAs) using a rich new micro data set containing 23 million housing transactions in 94 metropolitan areas between 1993 and...

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...

In this paper, we attempt to explain differences between the US and UK household wealth distributions, with an emphasis on the quite different porfolios held in stock and housing equities in the two countries. As a proportion of their total wealth, British households hold relatively small...

Using 1990 Census tract-level data, we estimate how tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing are distributed spatially across the United States, calculating their value as the difference in taxes currently paid by home owners and the taxes owners would pay if there were no preference for...

We analyze mortgage lenders' behavior with respect to shale gas risk during the period of the U.S. shale gas boom, which coincided with fluctuations in the U.S. housing market and increased scrutiny in the lending industry. Shale gas operations have the potential to place affected houses into...

We show that borrowers are highly sensitive to the requirement of posting their homes as collateral. Using administrative loan application and performance data from the U.S. Federal Disaster Loan Program, we exploit a loan amount threshold above which households must post their residence as...

We study the severity of liquidity constraints in the U.S. housing market using a life-cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in which houses are illiquid, but agents have the option to extract home equity by refinancing their long-term mortgages. The model implies that three quarters...