Annuities, long-term care insurance (LTCI), and reverse mortgages appear to offer important consumption smoothing benefits to the elderly, yet private markets for these products are small. A prominent idea is to combine LTCI and annuities to alleviate both supply (selection) and demand...

This paper explains why selection in the US reverse mortgage market to date has been advantageous rather than adverse. Reverse mortgages let quot;house rich, cash poorquot; older homeowners transfer wealth from the wealthy period after their home is sold to the impoverished period before. Near...

Housing Supply in Manhattan has fallen relative to total US housing supply over the last 45 years. This time trend is entirely explained away by a combination of the fall of Robert Moses's urban renewal empire and the decreasing national share of construction that is multifamily. Similar results...

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those used by Menahem E. Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive...

This paper shows how home equity may substitute for long-term care insurance (LTCI). The elderly commonly hold substantial wealth in the form of home equity that is rarely spent before death, except for after moves to long-term care facilities. Absent strong bequest motives implies that marginal...

Dense, expensive, litigious, and highly regulated, Manhattan typifies coastal US housing markets. Manhattan has lost share of US residential construction over the last 45 years. Some attribute this trend to tightening local regulation, but the decline of public housing construction and the...

Annuities, long-term care insurance (LTCI), and reverse mortgages appear to offer important consumption smoothing benefits to the elderly, yet private markets for these products are small. A prominent idea is to combine LTCI and annuities to alleviate both supply (selection) and demand...

This paper analyzes the effects of land use constraints on housing prices. We provide a new framework for evaluating policy when mobility across regions is allowed but limited. A key result is that loosening regulatory constraints within individual regions would have little effect on prices for...