Overall regional conditions such as employment, geography, and amenities, favor the co-movement of housing prices in central cities and their suburbs. Simultaneously, over half a century of sprawl may induce a negative relation between suburban and central city home prices, with central city...

This chapter reviews the evidence of predictability in US residential and commercial real estate markets. First, we highlight the main methodologies used in the construction of real estate indices, their underlying assumptions and their impact on the stochastic properties of the resultant...

Everyone agrees that the recent financial crisis started with the deflation of the housing bubble. But what caused the bubble? Answering this question is important both for identifying the best short-term policies and for fixing the credit crisis, as well as for developing long-term policies...

This paper examines the effects of seller uncertainty over their home value on the housing market. Using evidence from a new dataset on home listings and transactions, I first show that sellers do not have full information about current period demand conditions for their homes. I incorporate...

This paper assesses the predictive power of variables that measure market tightness, such as seller's bargaining power and sale probabilities, on future home prices. Theoretical insights from a stylized search-and-matching model illustrate that such indicators can be associated with subsequent...

We investigate the determinants of Italian house prices and residential investments in a structural model with possible disequilibria in the market for lending to both households and firms in the building sector. Based on a structural approach that takes into account the multi-fold relationships...

The revival of strong capital flows to emerging economies in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09 has rekindled the debate on the adverse effects of excessive capital inflows. We study the effects of official and illicit capital flows on Hong Kong, which is a small and open...

Real estate bubbles can increase collateral value, thus relaxing financial constraints, which might spur innovation. However, they might also crowd out R&D expenditures, thus stifling corporate innovation. This paper shows that real estate prices negatively affect both corporate R&D and patents...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

We add arbitraging middlemen -- investors who attempt to profit from buying low and selling high -- to a canonical housing market search model. Flipping tends to take place in sluggish and tight, but not in moderate, markets. There is the possibility of multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium,...