The high growth rate of mortgage debt in various emerging and developed economies has captured headlines following the financial crisis. In this paper, we investigate how mortgage debt impacts household consumption behavior and various components of household consumption. Utilizing a...

We consider the problem of a seller who faces an unknown number of offers where each offer is a random draw from a known distribution. The objective of the seller is to maximize the probability that the highest offer is chosen. We show that the optimal strategy is characterized by a...

Empirical testing of the real options theory has been very limited. This is primarily due to various inherent problems with obtaining field data for many components of real options theory. This paper utilizes experimental methodology to generate the data. The advantage of the experimental...

Empirical testing of the real options theory has been very limited. This is primarily due to various inherent problems with obtaining field data for many components of real options theory. This paper utilizes experimental methodology to generate the data. The advantage of the experimental...

This paper studies how borrowers with different levels of default risk would self-select between Fixed Rate Mortgages (FRMs) and Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs). We show that under asymmetric information, where the risk type of a borrower is private information to the borrower and not known by...

This paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of the exclusive agency and exclusive-right-to-sell contracts used in real estate brokerage. The theoretical model predicts that while both contract types will yield the same price, the exclusive agency contract will result in faster sales...

In residential real estate an agent is often hired when an owner decides to sell his property. The seller may have less information than his agent and thus may be at a disadvantage in setting the asking price and negotiating the final selling price. The purpose of this study is to offer...

Conventional wisdom in the mortgage industry holds that loan-to-value (LTV) ratios are positively correlated with mortgage default rates. However, not all empirical studies of mortgage loan performance support this view. This paper offers a theoretical signaling model of why the correlation...

Earlier studies (e.g., Joskow, 1973; Cummins and VanDerhei, 1979; and Barrese and Nelson, 1992) have shown that insurers using independent agencies have higher costs than those employing the direct writing system. These studies indicate that competition in insurance markets should have eliminated the...

Coordination games can represent a wide range of issues in real estate. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment designed to investigate the impact of regulatory threats in a coordination game. The experiment consisted of two sessions. The first session included a simple...