We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

In this paper, we analyze the borrowing behavior of Japanese households in comparison to the other Group of Seven (G7) countries and also broken down by the age group of the household head. We find that pre-retirement households (households with a head in the 50-59 age group) in Japan do not...

Using the universe of mortgage applications data in the US, we document that since the early 1990s there was a significant decline in the share of mortgages with a co-borrower. The decline, despite being a universal phenomenon across the US, evinced significant spatial heterogeneity and...

China has experienced a rapid boom in real estate prices in the last few decades, leading to a substantial increase in living costs and heavy financial burdens on households. Using an instrumental variable approach, this paper exploits spatial and temporal variation in housing price appreciation...

We find that the viewership of business television raises the propensity of households to refinance their homes when doing so is financially advantageous. To estimate the effect of business TV, we exploit the staggered entry of Fox Business Network (FBN) into zip codes across the U.S. Exposure...

We study the genesis of the 2000s housing boom in Denmark, a country with a similar mortgage finance system to the U.S., but where subprime mortgages were absent, regulatory loan-to-value ratios were unchanged, and there was no reallocation of credit towards low income borrowers. Our results...

This paper shows that households' mortgage refinancing decisions suboptimally depend on uninformative reference points, imposing a friction to the refinancing channel of monetary policy. I study refinancing behavior in the UK, where on pre-determined dates initial fixed rates reset and...

House prices have increased faster than average income in many countries over the last decade, raising concerns on the affordability of housing. We study the impact of transaction taxes on the real estate market and the effectiveness of tax subsidies to make housing more affordable. We show how...

Recurrent list-price reductions of a house may signal a movement towards fair pricing or underpricing, and the impatience of sellers to enter a sell transaction more quickly. Recurrent list-price reductions may also provide a market signal that the listings are problematic and thus harder to...

We estimate the intergenerational correlation in homeownership status between two generations for cohorts covering the 20th century. First, we find higher intergenerational correlation in France compared to previous results obtained for the U.K. for similar cohorts. Second, the intergenerational...