We infer the role of price expectations in forming the U.S. housing boom in the early-2000s from examining housing inventories. We use a reduced form model to show that agents invest in vacant homes when they anticipate prices will increase. Empirically, vacancy can discriminate between price...

This paper shows that rising real estate prices reduce industry productivity, because they lead to a reallocation of capital and labor towards inefficient firms. I establish that the rise in real estate value during the US housing boom relaxes firms' financial constraints. Companies borrow...

In this paper, we first document the important role played by real estate investors in the recent housing cycle using mortgage loan level data. We show that the fraction of mortgage applications as well as originations that are for investment homes led both the boom and the bust. Additionally,...

The Financial Accounting Standards Board issued the current expected credit loss (CECL) standard, which requires banks to take a forward-looking approach to recognizing life-of-loan losses upon loan origination. Using bank mortgage approval decisions at the ZIP code level and a...