In the U.S. economy during the past 25 years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents, and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight connection...

We study the importance of supply constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in house price cycles across geographies in the United States. Comparing the equilibrium house price generated with and without supply constraints in a representative-agent model under irreversibility of housing...

This paper studies the effects of imperfect risk-sharing between lenders and borrowers on commercial property prices and leverage. The key friction is that agents use different discount rates to evaluate future flows. Eliminating this pecuniary externality generates large reductions in the...

Heterogeneous firm models are ubiquitous in modern macroeconomics. We revisit a central feature of these models: the idiosyncratic shock process faced by firms. Using a large representative firm-level dataset, we document nonparametrically that the common assumption, a Gaussian AR(1) shock...

In the Solidarity Game (Selten and Ockenfels, 1998) lucky winners of a lottery can transfer part of their income to unlucky losers. Will losers get smaller transfers if they can be assumed to be (partly) responsible for their zero income because they have chosen riskier lotteries (Trhal and...