Between 1960 and 1980, the number of households in the U.S. increased by 50 percent and the proportion of the population that were household heads rose from 29.5 to 36.3. While some of this increase was due to the maturing of the"baby boom" population, over half was caused by rising age-specific...

Mortgage interest tax deductibility is needed to treat debt and equity financing of homes equally. Countries that limit deductibility create a debt tax penalty that presumably leads households to shift from debt toward equity financing. The greater the shift, the less is the tax revenue raised...

Markets for property space adjust only gradually because tenants are constrained by long-term leases and landlords and tenants face transactions and information costs. Not only do rents adjust slowly, but space occupancy may differ from demand at current rent, giving rise to "hidden vacancies"....

Oswald hypothesizes that regions and countries with high homeownership rates will experience higher natural rates of unemployment and that rising homeownership in OECD countries since the 1960s provides a key explanation for the rise in the natural rate of unemployment over the same time period....

Recent analyses have suggested the irrationality of investors in Australian and U.S. office properties. More specifically, investors have failed to raise capitalization rates sufficiently at rental cyclical peaks to account for the obvious mean reversion in real rents and thus have significantly...

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...

We consider the role that seller motivation plays in determining selling time, list price, and sale price. A new survey of home sellers suggests that sellers are heterogeneous in their motivation to sell. Our findings are that a seller who, at the time of listing, has a planned date to move...