Individuals and firms pledge collateral to mitigate agency costs or contracting frictions in a world with asymmetric information. However, the option value theory suggests that once the mark-to-market asset valuation is below the current debt, the firms and individuals should default on their...

In this article, we test whether tenure choice influences employment. This influence might arise through a number of channels, including transaction costs, lock-in effects, wealth effects, externalities and commuting times. These factors could collectively have either a positive or negative...

The United States is aging, and many baby boomers are reaching or will soon reach the retirement age of sixty-five. On the other hand, the Millennials, the biggest generation in the U.S. history, has been experiencing the issues of rental affordability and uncertainty in housing market. Given...

This study examines how the changing composition of adult educational attainment in cities affects the distribution of wages and rents in those cities. We extend the Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium model to show that as the share of college graduates increases, the impact of this change on the...

This paper provides a conceptual basis for the price discovery potential for tradable market instruments and specifically the development of mortgage securitization in Asia and the potential dangers of such markets. Nonetheless we argue for the potential importance of securitization in Asia...

It is hard to estimate housing supply elasticities. India is a particularly useful country to study housing supply because it is large and has a variety of housing typologies. We estimate the supply elasticity of non-durable, durable, and vacant residential housing units in urban India. We use...

One housing paradox in many markets is the simultaneous presence of high costs and high vacancy. India has expensive housing relative to incomes and an urban housing vacancy rate of 12.4%. We look at two possible explanations for vacancy – pro-tenant rent control laws, and poor contract...

We show that pro-tenant rent control laws increase the rural-urban wage gap by reducing rural-urban migration in India. Migrants are more likely to rent when they move to cities. Rent control laws reduce the supply of rental housing, thereby increasing the costs of migration to cities....

In this paper we investigate the relationship between school quality and information disclosure in housing markets. When presented with the option of identifying their local public school in a real estate listing, we find that sellers with homes assigned to higher-performing schools are more...