Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on...

We use data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to explore how household asset portfolios in the United States evolved between 1989 and 2016. Throughout this period, two key assets - housing and financial market assets - drove the household balance sheet evolution;...

Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices...

Shiller (2003) and others have argued for the creation of financial instruments that allow households to insure risks associated with their lifetime labor income. In this paper, we argue that while the purpose of such assets is to smooth consumption across states of nature, one must also...

We propose a new approach to model high and low frequency components of equity correlations. Our framework combines a factor asset pricing structure with other specifications capturing dynamic properties of volatilities and covariances between a single common factor and idiosyncratic returns....

This paper studies how local land-use regulations and community opposition affect the trade-offs to building single-family, multifamily, and affordable housing and how their effects on rents differ from their effects on house prices. Using lot-level zoning regulations and a boundary...

The application of information technology to finance, or "fintech," is expected to revolutionize many aspects of borrowing and lending in the future, but technology has been reshaping consumer and mortgage lending for many years. During the 1990s, computerization allowed mortgage lenders to...

The reallocation of mortgage debt to low-income or marginally qualified borrowers plays a central role in many explanations of the early 2000s housing boom. We show that such a reallocation never occurred, as the distribution of mortgage debt with respect to income changed little even as the...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper examines the flow of U.S. households within and between two distinct segments of the housing market - renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The paper provides relevant empirical moments for microfounded models of...

In the United States, 15 percent of households change residence in a given year. This result is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on gross flows within and between the two segments of the housing market-renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The gross flows...