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...

A dramatic decline in the maximum loan amount eligible for FHA mortgage insurance in the Salt Lake City metropolitan statistical area between 2013 and 2014 provides a natural experiment in the impact of borrowing constraints on housing decisions. Using a differences-in-differences design within...

This paper examines the properties of optimal times to sell a diversified real estate portfolio. The portfolio value is supposed to be the sum of the discounted free cash flows and the discounted terminal value (the discounted selling price). According to Baroni et al. (2007b), we assume that...

Households who wish to extract home equity through refinancing their mortgage face a hidden transaction cost. The real value of the fixed nominal mortgage payment declines over time with inflation. The change in the real value of the mortgage payments from taking on a new mortgage is positive...

This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...

The most recent financial crisis highlights the importance of event risks and the ensuing market illiquidity and worsening investment opportunity set for optimal portfolio selection. However, the existing portfolio selection literature does not consider the joint impact of these risks. In this...

We study a continuous-time model of consumption and portfolio selection with limited commitment in a stochastic environment. The credit constraints of a household are determined endogenously in the credit market where creditors know that the household is not committed to payment of debt. By...

We study the consumption and investment model under time-varying liquidity constraints (TVLC) that are widely used in reality. We first develop a martingale method to analyze the case in which the borrowing limit is specified by the debt-to-income ratio limit and then extend this framework to...

We examine the problem of an investor who trades in a market with unobservable regime shifts. The investor learns from past prices and is subject to transaction costs. Our model generates significantly larger liquidity premia compared to a benchmark model with observable market shifts. The...

We generate large liquidity premia endogenously from the interaction of transaction costs with convexity in preferences, offering a novel explanation for a longstanding puzzle. We derive this result from the dynamic portfolio problem of mutual fund managers facing either convex flows or year-end...