Recent analyses have suggested the irrationality of investors in Australian and U.S. office properties. More specifically, investors have failed to raise capitalization rates sufficiently at rental cyclical peaks to account for the obvious mean reversion in real rents and thus have significantly...

Rental adjustment equations have been estimated for a quarter century. In the U.S., models have used the deviation of the actual vacancy rate from the natural rate as the main explanatory variable, while in the UK, drivers of the demand for space have dominated the estimation. The recent papers...

Periodic sharp sustained increases and then reversals in asset prices lead many to posit irrational price bubbles. The general case for irrationality is that real asset prices simply have moved too much given the future real cash flows the assets are reasonably likely to produce. A corollary for...

Real estate markets are periodically plagued by excess supply, rent concessions and few arms-length transactions. During such periods, valuation is problematic. The model presented here requires the forecasts of future vacancy rates, and equilibrium and actual rental rates. Vacancy rate...

Mankiw and Weil have estimated a demographically-driven real house price equation on annual data from the 1947-87 period and used it to forecast real house prices over the 1988-2007 period. The result is their infamous 47 percent real decline. Their equation really only fits data from the 1950s...

During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. government closely regulated the single-family housing finance system. The regulation manifested itself in a highly specialized system with four notable characteristics: portfolio restrictions against investments in corporate assets, tax inducements to invest...

Three major changes occurred during the 1980s in the market for home mortgage credit; the securitization of fixed-rate mortgages, the development of a national primary market for adjustable-rate mortgages, and the decimation of the saving and loan industry. These changes and their impacts on...

Early tax reform proposals listed economic growth as a major goal, and some even gave explicit estimates of the expected increase in the long run output path that would follow from enactment. The 1986 Tax Act does not mention growth, much less give estimates of the expected increase, for good...

This paper summarizes the impact of economic, social and demographic variables on household formations and home ownership in the 1960-85 period and uses this knowledge to forecast household formations, and their split between owners and renters, through the year 2000. High and low growth...

Two phenomena characterized the housing market in the 1970s: a somewhat-disguised surge toward home ownership and a well-publicized sharp increase in the real price of housing. These movements were partially reversed in the first half of the 1980s. In the "standard view", the 1970s changes are...