Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected...

This paper analyses the default option typical to American mortgages. Households borrow to buy durable housing, but future house prices are uncertain, and households find it dvantageous to default on their debt if house prices fall sufficiently. A key assumption of the model is that households...

This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred...

Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on...

This paper examines the contributions of population aging, mortgage innovation and historically low interest rates to the sharp rise in U.S. house prices and mortgage debt between 1994 and 2005. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium housing model and find that these three...

We develop a dynamic urban model combining features of quantitative spatial and macro-housing models. It includes multiple locations, forward-looking households, commuting, costly migration, uninsurable income risk, housing tenure choice, and housing frictions. The model operates in continuous...

Unemployment leads to large and persistent income losses for workers. Higher unemployment in the labor market therefore has spillover effects on the housing market. This paper studies such spillover effects from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Using data from the Current Population...

This paper quantitatively accounts for the cyclical dynamics of key macroeconomic housing and mortgage market variables using a tractable, searchtheoretic model of housing with equilibrium mortgage default. To explain these dynamics, the model highlights the importance of liquidity spirals that...

We consider taxation by a Leviathan government and by a utilitarian government in the presence of heterogenous locations within a country, when migration from one country to another is and is not possible. In a closed economy, a utilitarian government may transfer income from the poor to the...