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...

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...

Demand pressure, not supply inelasticity, explains coastal markets' high price volatility relative to other US markets in the housing cycle of 1998 through 2009. Relative to a comparison group of more elastically supplied markets facing similar historical demand pressure, coastal markets saw...

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...

Segregation of households on the dimension of income at the jurisdictional level is interesting to economists because, under some conditions, it is an equilibrium condition in the political economy models of jurisdiction choice that follow from Tiebout. This paper addresses the measurement of...

This paper explains why selection in the US reverse mortgage market to date has been advantageous rather than adverse. Reverse mortgages let quot;house rich, cash poorquot; older homeowners transfer wealth from the wealthy period after their home is sold to the impoverished period before. Near...

Economists have long puzzled over the apparent failure of older homeowners to cash out home equity. Casual observation, however, suggests that older homeowners under-maintain their homes. Estimated home equity reduction may thus be biased downward if self-reported home values do not incorporate...

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...

Long term care is one of the few observable triggers for home sale among the elderly. Combined with a thin reverse mortgage market, this helps rationalize weak demand for Long Term Care Insurance (LTCI). Home equity typically tapped primarily in the event of long term care reduces the gain to...

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness that are substantially less restrictive than those used by Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive annuitization remains...