This study extends recent work that developed and tested economic models of the joint decisions of household formation and homeownership. The cost of shelter is an important determinant of whether youth live independently (apart from parents and other nonrelated adults), and the cost of...

We examine foreclosures on FHA single family mortgages insured during 1975-87. The importance of the market value of borrower equity, and of the dispersion of national house prices support much earlier work emphasizing the key role of negative equity in triggering default. The lower the "mean"...

Real house prices are directly determined by the willingness of households to pay for (and willingness of builders to supply) a constant-quality house. Changes in the quantity of housing demanded will affect real prices only to the extent that the long-run housing supply schedule is positively...

Real metropolitan house prices have been quite volatile during the 1977-91 period, with half of our 30 areas having annual increases of above 15 percent in a single year and a third having decreases greater than 7.5 percent. Drawing on Capozza and Helsley's models of real land prices, we express...

The 1980s was a bad decade for FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance (MMI) program, the mainstay of FHA's single family mortgage insurance. While the MMI Fund is required by statute to be actuarially sound, the Fund lost close to $6 billion dollars, and its economic value declined from 5.3 percent of...

The 1980s S&L debacle is generally viewed as the result of: (1) sharply rising interest rates eliminating the net worth of thrifts funding fixed-rate loans with short-term deposits and (2) thrifts responding by taking even greater interest-rate and credit risks. The question investigated in this...

This paper uses a general equilibrium model to simulate both the effects of a preferential capital-gains tax rate on total income tax revenues and the effects of a revenue-neutral substitution between a capital gains preference and marginal income tax rates on economic efficiency and the...

We analyze monthly returns on an equally-weighted index of 18 to 23 equity (real property) real estate investment trusts (REITs) that were traded on major stock exchanges over the 1973-87 period. We employ a multifactor Arbitrage Pricing Model using prespecified macroeconomic factors. We also...

While there seems to be no end to estimates of housing tenure determinants, prior studies have not accounted for the simultaneity of tenure choice with household formation, labor supply or the marriage decision. Our estimates are superior to those in the literature both because we address these...

Although the economic literature has analyzed some components of the headship decision, study of household formation has been primarily in the realm of demography. We begin with a pure demographic model and expand it to include additional determinants of the decision to remain with parents or...