Four tax reform proposals have been advanced in recent years: Bradley-Gephardt, Kemp-Kasten, Treasury-Department and the Administration plan. These plans could have significant impacts on financial markets. Reductions ininvestment incentives and marginal tax rates would tend to lower before-tax...

This paper provides a framework for pricing adjustable rate mortgages and summarizes some evidence on the prices (additions to the coupon rate) necessary to cover expected losses from binding of varios interest rate caps and from mortgage default and foreclosure. Both interst rate and default...

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...

Changes in six-month bill rates over semiannual periods in the 1960s and 1970s are successfully related to expected changes and to surprises. The latter include unanticipated changes in expected inflation, in the growth of industrial production and base money, and in inflation uncertainty....

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...

Enormously diverse real and nominal ex post returns on equity and short and long term debt securities have accompanied substantial variations in inflation and resource utilization during the past half century. This paper contains an examination of the relationships among these security returns...

This paper presents calculations of the impacts of two levels of mortgage revenue bonds (MRBs) on: (1) yields on home mortgages, tax-exempt bonds and taxable bonds, (2) the allocation of the American fixed capital stock among residential (by three tax brackets), business, and state and local...

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...

Real estate markets are periodically plagued by excess supply, rent concessions and few arms-length transactions. During such periods, valuation is problematic. The model presented here requires the forecasts of future vacancy rates, and equilibrium and actual rental rates. Vacancy rate...

Mankiw and Weil have estimated a demographically-driven real house price equation on annual data from the 1947-87 period and used it to forecast real house prices over the 1988-2007 period. The result is their infamous 47 percent real decline. Their equation really only fits data from the 1950s...