The Legacy Loans Program (LLP) is an elaborate way of slicing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC's) receivership assets. At best, the financial structure is irrelevant to the FDIC's expected long-run recovery rates. Yet, it may boost short-term prices by creating bond insurance...

An unprecedented number of hotel company mergers took place between 2004 and 2007. The purpose of this study was to determine whether there were abnormal stock returns or volume activity in the periods surrounding the merger announcement date in the trading of 19 public hotel companies which...

Examining US data, this study uses techniques of cointegration analysis to test whether real estate investment trusts (REITs) are a useful hedge against inflation. Johansen tests seem to indicate that REITs are cointegrated with the general price level. This is true for a broad REIT index as...

Deuten die aktuellen Preisanstiege auf den Immobilienmärkten auf eine Immobilienblase hin? Für Andreas Dombret, Deutsche Bundesbank, gehören Preisblasen an Immobilienmärkten zu den größten Risiken für die Finanzstabilität. Die Folgen derartiger Übertreibungen könnten...

This paper analyses the characteristics and functioning of real estate markets. It focuses on the relationship between developments in these markets and the financial sector to determine under what circumstances real estate booms and busts can develop and how they can affect the health and...

This paper examines housing finance and housing price dynamics in selected emerging Middle Eastern economies over the past two decades. It finds that (i) mortgage markets have experienced rapid development, which has led to lower private per capita consumer spending volatility this decade; (ii) a...

This Selected Issues paper for Belgium evaluates whether price increases in Belgium are excessive. It assesses the household and bank balance sheets and their vulnerability to a slowdown in housing prices, and identifies differences in real estate markets between Belgium and other countries. The...

In this paper we use a disequilibrium framework common in the “credit crunch†literature, first to examine whether the slow credit growth in Morocco during the rapid expansion of liquidity in the first half of the decade can be attributed to credit rationing, and second to investigate...

Korean household debt has reached 148 percent of disposable income, high by emerging market standards. Most of this debt remains at variable rates, shifting the interest rate risk from better diversified financial institutions to households and increasing their sensitivity to macroeconomic...