Recurrent list-price reductions of a house may signal a movement towards fair pricing or underpricing, and the impatience of sellers to enter a sell transaction more quickly. Recurrent list-price reductions may also provide a market signal that the listings are problematic and thus harder to...

Many struggling mortgage borrowers who have home equity lose it through foreclosure. To explainwhy they do not just sell their homes instead, this paper develops a new model of mortgage default in which homeowners face psychic moving costs. A transparent calibration procedure yields psychic...

We study the effect of borrowing constraints in an assignment model of the housing market. When constraints apply symmetrically to all households, these lead to lower prices but unchanged housing consumption. When households can invest their own wealth and may differ in tastes, borrowing...

The special, dual nature of property as both a consumption and an investment goodmakes it salient for portfolio choice. In fact, the theoretical literature predicts a con-straint imposed by property on investment and the empirical literature has broughtevidence that this constraint, in some...

We study the impact of scarcity on intermediary profits through an analysis of the effects of the 2011 Japanese tsunami on the U.S. used car market. The tsunami devastated Japanese new car production for several months, which we show led to a demand surge for used cars. Wholesale and retail...

Wealthier individuals have stronger incentives to seek higher returns. We investigate theoretically the effect this has on long-run wealth inequality. Incorporating capital management into a standard RamseyCass-Koopmans model generates substantial long-run inequality: the majority of the...

This paper theoretically studies the interaction between an informed borrower and an uninformed lender facing possible default of a loan application. The lender is motivated to invest cognitive resources before making a lending decision. If the regulatory fine is weak, it is impossible for a...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

We study how individual unemployment expectations are shaped and updated using a unique longitudinal survey data set with subjective unemployment expectations. The survey data is linked with third-party reported administrative data on unemployment realizations, such that we are able to examine...