Housing affordability is the main policy challenge for many large cities in the world. Zoning changes, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy makers. But how effective are they at combatting the affordability crisis? We build a new framework to...

We explore what private market data can tell us about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. We estimate the term structure of discount rates for real estate up to the very long horizons relevant for investments in climate change abatement. The...

We empirically analyze pricing of political uncertainty in long-term property rights, guided by a theoretical model of housing assets subject to contract extension in the remote future. To identify exposure to political uncertainty, we exploit a unique variation around land lease extension...

We administer a newly-designed survey to a large panel of retail investors who have substantial wealth invested in financial markets. The survey elicits beliefs that are crucial for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with administrative data on their portfolio composition and...

Market-wide, stock market specific, and real estate market specific risk – what kind of risk and to which extent drives the returns of listed real estate? Based on a structural asset pricing model calibrated to the empirical data in the U.S., we show that at least two thirds of the risk...

Firm location affects firm risk through local factor prices. We find more procyclical factor prices such as wages and real estate prices in areas with more cyclical economies, namely high “local beta” areas. While procyclical wages provide a natural hedge against aggregate shocks and reduce...

Paper now titled "Mortgage Default Risk: Evidence from Internet Search Queries" See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2816207We use Google search data to develop a broad-based and real-time index of housing distress. Unlike established indicators, this new Housing Distress...

The optimal investment to mitigate climate change crucially depends on the discount rate used to evaluate the investment's uncertain future benefits. The appropriate discount rate is a function of the horizon over which these benefits accrue and the riskiness of the investment. In this paper, we...

Using recently developed econometric procedures (Phillips, Wu and Yu, 2011; Phillips, Shi and Yu, 2015), we find evidence of temporary episodes of explosive behaviour in price-to-rent ratios for established houses, in five of Australia's largest cities. One interpretation of our results is that...

We administer a newly-designed survey to a large panel of retail investors who have substantial wealth invested in financial markets. The survey elicits beliefs that are crucial for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with administrative data on their portfolio composition and...