Reverse mortgages help elderly homeowners to unlock and consume home equity while continuing residing in their homes. Demand for reverse mortgage is far behind predictions. Based on a survey of U.S. homeowners aged 58 we assess product knowledge (literacy) and its relation to reverse mortgage...

Housing Supply in Manhattan has fallen relative to total US housing supply over the last 45 years. This time trend is entirely explained away by a combination of the fall of Robert Moses's urban renewal empire and the decreasing national share of construction that is multifamily. Similar results...

Economists sometimes assume that strictly regulated housing markets near mountains and oceans are expensive because they are costly places to build, not because they are nice places with productive firms and workers. U.S. data show this convenient assumption to be false. Housing supply has grown...

Home Equity Conversion Mortgages ("HECMs'') implicitly bundle put options on borrowers' homes with non-defaultable credit lines. Put proceeds are bequeathable and insure longevity and home prices. Credit use is elective, so the put's expected net present value bounds HECM's value to borrowers...

There is no evidence that differences in supply elasticity caused cross sectional variation among US housing markets in the severity of the 2000s housing cycle. This is true in three sets of empirical specifications: a first that assumes identical demand changes in the 2000s across markets, a...

Home Equity Conversion Mortgages ("HECMs") offer older US homeowners liquidity and implicit home price insurance. If borrowers' homes are worth less than their loan balance when they move or die, their liability is limited to collateral value. The Federal Housing Administration ("FHA") absorbs...

For most US households, labor income is the most important source of wealth and housing is the most important risky asset. A natural intuition is thus that households whose incomes covary relatively strongly with housing prices should own relatively little housing. Under plausible assumptions on...

We analyze an economy in which desirable land is inelastically supplied. A single government sets taxes on labor income, real property, and other commodities subject to the constraint that pure land rents and elastically supplied land development and structures are taxed at a common rate. The...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

This paper advances the theory of annuity demand. First, we derive sufficient conditions under which complete annuitization is optimal, showing that this well-known result holds true in a more general setting than in Yaari (1965). Specifically, when markets are complete, sufficient conditions...