We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic rational bubble. We study housing markets in the...

We utilize the decennial U.S. Census to study social effects in housing consumption across 4 million households from 126 ethnic groups and 2,071 geographic locations in the U.S. We find that the home ownership decisions within ethnic groups are locally correlated, after controlling for the home...

Housing affordability has been a topic of much interest in New Zealand over recent years with the median house price increasing by over 50% between 2004 and 2008. The aim of this paper is to inform debate by drawing out evidence from two surveys: the Household Economic Survey (HES); and the...

This paper studies the role of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in the US housing boom-bust cycle. I find that the enhancement in CRA enforcement in 1998 increased the growth rate of mortgage lending by CRA-regulated banks to CRA-eligible census tracts. I show that during the boom period...

"Right to Buy" (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment by which incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the UK homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. This paper studies its impact on crime, showing...

Which housing characteristics are important for understanding homeownership rates? How are housing characteristics priced in the rental and owner-occupied markets? And what can the answers to the previous questions tell us about economic theories of homeownership? Using the English Housing...

After rising for a decade, the U.S. homeownership rate peaked at 69 percent in the third quarter of 2006. Over the next two and a half years, as home prices fell in many parts of the country and the unemployment rate rose sharply, the homeownership rate declined by 1.7 percentage points. An...

Während direkte Immobilieninvestments lang Zeit als renditeträchtig bei gleichzeitig begrenztem Risiko galten, führte den Anlegern insbesondere die gegenwärtige Finanzmarktkrise vor Augen, dass auch Immobilienanlagen insbesondere in den USamerikanischen Häusermarkt mit hohen Risiken...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...