Borrowers in states with non-recourse mortgage law face limited liability on their mortgage loans. We show that non-recourse law causes larger swings in housing prices by encouraging speculative investments when housing markets are in a boom cycle. We find that mortgage lending pricing does not...

I examine racial bias in the most popular home valuation algorithm and study the algorithm's impact on racial bias in transaction prices. I find statistically significant but economically small racial bias in the algorithm. For example, while Black buyers overpay by 9.3% in prices relative to...

Housing prices, like the prices of other speculative assets, contain a mix of both small and large changes (i.e., jumps). We apply a jump-GARCH model to monthly Case-Shiller housing price indexes of twenty cities in the U.S. during the period January 1991 through December 2011. We document the...

This study investigates whether the unprecedented liquidity injected in the economy by the U.S Fed through unconventional monetary policy measure, popularly known as quantitative easing (QE), is a systematic factor that can explain the abnormally low U.S. housing starts of recent years. We use...

I study a staggered policy change intended to reduce bidding wars for homes by increasing their list price and eliminating underpricing. Using a novel and large micro data set and a difference-in-difference methodology, I find that increasing the list price reduces the buyer arrival rates in all...

This paper examines the effect of a currency changeover on prices. A parsimonious model shows that, during a period of currency changeover, sellers and buyers conversely opt for the currency dominating the negotiation based on exchange rate fluctuations between the preceding and the new currency...

This paper aims to achieve two objectives. First, we demonstrate that with respect to business cycle frequency (Burns and Mitchell, 1946), there was a general decrease in the association between macroeconomic variables (MV) and housing market variables (HMV) following the global financial crisis...

We study the economic effects of place-based policies in the housing market, by investigating the effects of a place-based programme on prices of surrounding owner-occupied properties. The programme improved the quality of public housing in 83 impoverished neighbourhoods throughout the...

The house price-to-income ratio (PIR) is widely used as an affordability indicator. This paper complements the cross-sectionally focused literature by proposing a tractable model for the PIR dynamics. Our model predicts that the PIR is very persistent and is correlated to the lagged aggregate...

Are ownership incentive policies inevitably accompanied by detrimental inflationary effects?To address this issue, we develop a theoretical model in which owners of new housing benefit from a homeownership subsidy or a rental investment incentive. We show that while both incentives increase the...