This study looks at real estate price booms and busts in industrialised countries. Itidentifies major and persistent deviations from long term trends for 18 countries andestimates the probabilities of their occurrence using a Random Effects Panel Probitmodel over the period 1980-2007. It finds...

This paper analyses rental contracts in the housing market assu-ming asymmetric information about tenant related `service cost' andimperfect mobility. On the positive side it explains why long standingtenants tend to enjoy lower rents |the so called `tenure discount'. Onthe normative side, it...

We consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit markets used by households. Inour economy, houses provide housing services to consumers and serve as collateral to lower borrowingcost.We show that this amplifies and propagates the effect of monetary policy shocks on...

The crisis enveloping global financial markets since August 2007 was triggered by actual and prospective credit losses on US mortgages. Was the United States just unlucky to have been the first to experience a housing crisis? Or was it inherently more susceptible to one? I examine the limited...

We use a user-cost model to study how dispersed information among housing marketparticipants a¤ects the equilibrium house price. In the model, agents are disparatelyinformed about local economic conditions, consume housing services, and speculate onprice changes. Information dispersion leads...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly availableinformation. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be ofnonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

A pay-as-you-go (paygo) pension program may provide intergenerational pooling of risks toindividuals´ labor and capital income over the life cycle. By means of a model that providesilluminating closed form solutions, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the optimal paygoprogram and the nature...

We analyze the effect of enhanced annuities on an insurer engaging in individualunderwriting. We use a frailty model for the heterogeneity of the insured populationand model the individual underwriting by a random variable that positivelycorrelates with the corresponding frailty factor. For a...

It is frequently noted that investment funds with a nonnormal return distributioncannot be adequately evaluated using the classic Sharpe ratio. However, recent research compared the Sharpe ratio with other performance measures and found virtually identical rank ordering using hedge fund data. We...

Das Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis herkömmlicher Rentenversicherungen steigt mitder Lebenserwartung des Versicherten. Derartige Produkte sind damit nur für Personen mit relativ hoher Lebenserwartung attraktiv. Der Nachteil für Versichertemit reduzierter Lebenserwartung wird durch steuerliche...