The boom and subsequent bust in housing construction and prices over the 2000s is widely regarded as a principal contributor to the Financial Panic of 2007 and the subsequent Great Recession. As of this writing, housing market activity remains at depressed levels as the economy slowly resolves...

By combining fresh estimates of housing supply and prices with recent long-term projections for their fundamental drivers such as population, income and interest rates, this paper produces scenarios for residential investment and real house prices up to 2050. For half of the covered countries,...

Making housing more affordable ranks high on the policy agenda across the world. One way to achieve affordable housing is to ensure sufficiently elastic supply of the housing stock in response to demand shocks. This paper aims at disentangling policy from non-policy drivers in explaining...

I estimate the impact of new housing supply on the local rent distribution, exploiting delays in housing completions caused by weather shocks during the construction phase. Increasing the flow of new supply by 1 percent lowers average rents by 0.2 percent, and increases disproportionately the...

Are ownership incentive policies inevitably accompanied by detrimental inflationary effects?To address this issue, we develop a theoretical model in which owners of new housing benefit from a homeownership subsidy or a rental investment incentive. We show that while both incentives increase the...

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...

This paper examines the effects of seller uncertainty over their home value on the housing market. Using evidence from a new dataset on home listings and transactions, I first show that sellers do not have full information about current period demand conditions for their homes. I incorporate...

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...