In this paper, I quantify the effect of buyers' uncertainty about a home's quality on its pricing and liquidity. I first develop a parsimonious model of home sale in which buyers learn about the home's quality from a walkthrough and from the home's days-on-market. Quality uncertainty distorts...

This paper argues that uncertainty can lead to higher price volatility and persistent estimation errors in the housing market. Empirically, I construct a Household Sentiment Index (HSI) by applying the Case-Shiller repeat-sales estimation method to the households' survey responses in the Panel...

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,...

The unprecedented damage caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster greatly altered people's awareness of risk not only in directly affected areas but also in unaffected areas as well. This study focuses on the relationship between earthquake risk and real estate prices in...

This paper studies idiosyncratic risk at the level of individual house resales. It is commonly assumed that the idiosyncratic price component follows a random walk. I show that housing market data reject this model, and that idiosyncratic risk is instead close to constant for holding periods up...

This paper investigates the effects of house price uncertainty shocks on economic activity, and traces the origins of the shocks. A Markov-switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR) model shows that house price uncertainty shocks in expansionary regimes increase residential investment, housing...

This paper shows that macroeconomic uncertainty affects the housing market in two significant ways. First, uncertainty shocks adversely a¤ect housing prices but not the quantities that are traded. Controlling for a broad set of variables in fixed-effects regressions, we find that uncertainty...

This paper analyzes the role of uncertainty in a multi-sector housing model with financial frictions. We include time varying uncertainty (i.e. risk shocks) in the technology shocks that affect housing production. The analysis demonstrates that risk shocks to the housing production sector are a...