We study the exposure of mortgage borrowers in Switzerland to interest rate, income and house price risks and examine how the households' choice of risky mortgages is related to individual interest rate expectations and risk-aversion. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of household...

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price...

England has very volatile house prices. We use pseudo-panel data spanning multiple house-price cycles over nearly forty years, to assess the extent to which house prices affect access to home ownership by age thirty, and whether differences in ownership rates persist. We find that ownership...

This paper studies household beliefs during the recent US housing boom. To characterize the heterogeneity in households' views about housing and the economy, we perform a cluster analysis on survey responses at different stages of the boom. The estimation always finds a small cluster of...

The tenure decision upon whether to buy or to rent accommodation has long-term consequences for households' financial wellbeing that influence macroeconomic development and stability when the cumulative effects of individual decisions are aggregated across populations. The author explains how...

This paper examines how family housing wealth affects homeownership transitions during divergent periods of credit access. I use matched parent-child data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and exploit variation across local housing markets, as well as the recent housing cycle, to assess...

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological refinancing costs that inhibit refinancing until incentives are strong enough; and to behavior---potentially attributable to information-gathering costs---that lowers the probability that a household...

The dual motives of housing behavior, consumption and investment make the analysis of housing purchases quite difficult. As a matter of fact, while a larger literature, theoretical and empirical, deals with housing tenure choice by modeling housing consumption demand, few studies have tried to...

The rate of homeownership is close to the OECD average in Luxembourg. However, strong house price increases, mainly driven by population growth and limited housing supply, led to a deterioration in affordability of housing, in particular for the young and added to the wealth gap between...

Are households more likely to be homeowners when “housing risk” is higher? We show that home-ownership rates and loan-to-value (LTV ) ratios at the city level are strongly negatively correlated with local house price volatility. However, causal inference is confounded by house price levels,...