We estimate total returns to rental housing by studying over 170,000 hand-collected archival observations of prices and rents for individual houses in Paris (1809-1943) and Amsterdam (1900-1979). The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.0% for Paris and 4.8% for Amsterdam,...

This paper investigates optimal tax policy when economic conditions are uncertain, creating risk in tax revenues. Optimal taxation with uncertainty balances costs from volatility and deadweight loss. Tax policy affects volatility through two channels; spreading risk between public and private...

This study empirically tests volatility effects on land development options using data on the government's land sales by tender for the period from 1995 to 2018. We find that development land option premiums increase by 6% on average with one standard deviation increase in conditional...

During the recent housing recession and financial crisis, mortgage modification has been heavily promoted by government as a way to stabilize the housing and the national banking systems. Numerous programs, such as the Home Owners Preserving Equity (HOPE), Home Affordability Modification Program...

This paper proposes a simple, partial equilibrium model for studying an individual's migration decisions. It shows that an individual may choose to delay migration when the condition appears to be favorable, giving rise to the “waiting” behavior observed in the data. Using a closed-form...

This study employs the hedonic property price method to analyze the flood risk effect on a rich set of data. The analysis is carried out on Hungary, but as the control variables are extremely elaborated, our results have general importance. The paper finds a significant reduction in housing...

When home prices threaten to decline, lenders bearing more of a community's mortgage risk have an incentive to combat this decline with new lending that boosts demand. We test whether this incentive drove the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to guarantee riskier mortgages in early 2007,...

Real estate markets are subject to dynamic, ever-changing influences from location, amenities and neighborhoods; regulation, zoning and population changes; but also - macroeconomic variables, such as interest rates, inflation and economic cycles. The decision to buy or rent a durable,...

Real estate developers face significant risks in managing new developments, and presale contracts are commonly used to shift these risks to buyers. We develop a theoretical model to show that presale prices are an increasing function of time and that earlier presales are associated with greater...

We expand the debate on incentives embedded in the originate-to-distribute lending model by presenting evidence on the placement of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) with mutual funds. We do so by capitalizing on a unique testing platform encompassing institutional holdings of private-label MBS...