This paper develops a dynamic equilibrium model to study the house price dynamics in the United States. I find that changes in down payment requirements can quantitatively account for the observed house price dynamics over the last three decades. The high and stable down payment requirements...

Using a comprehensive dataset of housing transactions in Beijing, China, we find that government officials are more likely than non-officials to buy housing units before government-imposed housing purchase restriction policy. We find that officials use their power to speed up the loan...

This paper tests Jensen (1986)'s free cash flow hypothesis using data on real estate transactions. We find that firms with either higher free cash flow or higher cash reserve pay more for real estate, which is consistent with the free cash flow hypothesis. We also find that the agency costs of...

Using price discounts government officials receive when buying new housing units as a measure of corruption in China, we examine the effect of the anti-corruption campaign launched by the Xi Jinping administration in 2012. We find that the discounts decrease sharply after the campaign. On the...