It has been widely assumed that there was a bubble in the U.S. housing market after1999.This paper analyzes the extent to which that was true. We define a bubble as: (1) a regime shift that is characterized by a change in the properties of deviations from the fundamentals of house price growth,...

This paper analyzes the risk-taking behavior of financial intuitions that have guarantees (e.g., banks with deposit insurance or Government Sponsored Enterprises with implicit guarantees) and/or institutions that find it beneficial to develop a reputation for not taking risk. For instance, banks...