The real estate market is highly intermediated, with 90 percent of buyers and sellers hiring an agent to help them transact a house. However, low barriers to entry and fixed commission rates result in a market where inexperienced intermediaries have a large market share, especially following...

Commercial real estate accounts for roughly 20% of the U.S. fixed asset stock, and commercial land use is highly regulated. However, little is known about the quantitative impact of these regulations on economic activity or consumer welfare. This paper develops a spatial general equilibrium...

We document that the recent house price experiences within an individual's social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from...

We provide evidence on the relationship between aggregate uncertainty and the macroeconomy. Identifying uncertainty shocks using methods from the news shocks literature, the analysis finds that innovations in realized stock market volatility are robustly followed by contractions, while shocks to...

This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where excess supply might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of China's rapidly...

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

Much of the empirical literature on the natural rate of interest has focused on estimating its path. This paper addresses the question of how exogenous movements in the natural rate of interest affect aggregate activity and inflation in the short and long runs. To this end it proposes a...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...