Historical anecdotes of new investors being drawn into a booming asset market, only to suffer when the market turns, abound. While the role of investor contagion in asset bubbles has been explored extensively in the theoretical literature, causal empirical evidence on the topic is virtually...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

Explaining asset price booms poses a difficult question for researchers in macroeconomics: how can large and persistent price growth be explained in the absence large and persistent variation in fundamentals? This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model...

We examine whether the recent behavior of real estate investors had an effect on housing affordability between 2007 and 2014. We analyze investors' purchasing and selling behavior and study their spillover effects on the affordability of the local real estate market where they invest. We find...

We examine a recent trend in the market where investors purchase residential properties. We find that investors purchase at a discount of 9.5% compared to individuals purchasing in the same period and geographic area. More specifically, we find that small investors purchase at a discount of...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...