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Discussions of whether a housing bubble exists generally rely on indirect barometers such as rapidly increasing prices, unrealistic expectations of future price increases, and rising ratios of housing price indexes to indexes of household income. Such measures cannot, however, answer the key...

This paper studies an economy inhabited by overlapping generations of homeowners and investors, with the only difference between the two being that homeowners derive utility from housing services whereas investors do not. Tight collateral constraint limits the borrowing capacity of homeowners...

Housing is an important sector of the economy. It has widespread implications for investment, banking, saving and employment. Home ownership has been linked to building social capital and a sense of community. Furthermore housing equity is a significant element of retirement accumulation for...

Housing is an important sector of the economy. It has widespread implications for investment, banking, saving and employment. Home ownership has been linked to building social capital and a sense of community. Furthermore housing equity is a significant element of retirement accumulation for...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing...

As significant part of national wealth, households' wealth is the central issue in both policy debate and academic literature. Nevertheless, in Hungary little effort has been made so far to conduct thorough evaluation of households' wealth for the last decade. Under the auspices of the plural of...

We use data from the European Household Finance and Consumption Survey in order to examine the distributional effect of intergenerational wealth transfers on the net worth distribution in 8 European countries and compare it to recent findings for the US. To do so, we resort to the decomposition...

Results from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey reveal substantial variation in household net wealth across euro area countries that await explanation. This paper focuses on three main factors for the wealth accumulation process, i) homeownership, ii) housing value...

The wealth possessed by households, identifiable as so-called net worth, varies greatly in quantity and form between different socioeconomic contexts. We describe several forms of wealth typically owned by consumer households, considering their economic and social effects. We analyze the...