With a neutral tax system an increase in observed and anticipated inflation would not be expected to alter either real after-tax yields on bonds and equities or the ratio of the market value of equities to the replacement cost of corporate real capital. In the real world, however, declines in...

This paper examines semiannual ex post returns on corporate equities and bonds and six-month Treasury bills over the 1953-84 period with special emphasis on whether returns so far in the 1980s have been usual relative to the previous quarter century. The performance of the equity and bond...

Earlier research has shown that lender income and wealth constraint ratios discourage homeownership. This empirical research has been based on home purchasers using an 80 percent loan-to-value (LTV) fixed-rate conventional loan. Employing the same assumption, we find that the constraints lowered...

This paper examines the effects of inflation on the allocation of resources between residential and nonresidential uses and the productivity of capital in the U.S. We begin by calculating the realized rates of return on homeowner equity and the contributions of fixed-rate mortgages and...

Real house prices are directly determined by the willingness of households to pay for (and willingness of builders to supply) a constant-quality house. Changes in the quantity of housing demanded will affect real prices only to the extent that the long-run housing supply schedule is positively...

During the last quarter century, mortgage interest deductibility has been gradually phased out. In 1974 a ceiling was set on the size of the mortgage eligible for interest deductibility (œ30,000 since 1983) and, beginning in 1993, the maximum rate at which interest under that ceiling could be...

A model is developed and utilized in this paper to value a life of loan interest rate cap on an ARM that reprices monthly. The value of the cap is seen to depend importantly on both the slope of the term structure and the variance of the one month rate. However, the cap value is not sensitive to...

This paper contains three parts: a discussion of the tax advantages of household capital (owner-occupied housing and consumer durables) relative to business capital (structures and producers durables) ,an analysis of alternative mechanisms for reducing these advantages (including the use of the...

Equilibrium analysis is a valuable tool in real estate investment research. In this survey, I show how equilibrium models have been used to estimate the required risk premium for different classes of real estate, to explain housing prices and rents, and to determine investment rental market...

The cyclical variation in office construction, vacancies, rents and values over the last decade has been enormous throughout the world. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced for this enormity, including prolifigate lenders, egomaniacal developers, and even rational behavior in the face of...