The existing measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with property prices. Taking into consideration that a housing purchase is a long-horizon decision and the property price reflects the discounted present value of future mortgage...

Most commonly used measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with house prices or housing costs. Despite the emphasis in the literature on the importance of long-term affordability, researchers have not developed measures of lifetime...

Policy makers often impose some cooling measures on the housing market when housing prices rise fast. Such policies yield limited success if housing prices are driven up by fundamentals. A fundamental price trend may not necessarily be an affordable one. Unaffordable housing price trends...

The instrumental variable (IV) estimator in a cross-sectional or panel regression model is often taken to provide valid causal inference from contemporaneous correlations. In this exercise we point out that the IV estimator, like the OLS estimator, cannot be used effectively for causal inference...

The existing measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with property prices. Taking into consideration that a housing purchase is a long-horizon decision and the property price reflects the discounted present value of future mortgage...

The link between mental stress and cancer is still a belief, not a well established scientific fact. Scientists have relied largely on opinions of cancer stricken patients to establish a link between stress and cancer. Such opinion surveys tend to produce contradictory statistical inferences....

Recurrent large fiscal deficits and accumulating public debt frequently ring alarm bells around the world on the sustainability of U.S. federal fiscal policy. The present-value borrowing constraint, which states that, for the fiscal policy to be sustainable the current debt stock should match...

This paper sheds further light on the debate spearheaded by Riedel (1988) on the specification of a small country export function. The theoretical and empirical analysis in the paper shows that while the price-taker assumption cannot be rejected, the export function for Singapore should not be...

Apart from aggregate accounting of Singapores investment abroad, case studies on the performance of these investments in individual countries hardly exist. This paper is an attempt to compile such a study by focusing on Singapores investment in Sri Lanka. Singapore is one of the largest foreign...