According to Mary Pope-Handy, the residents of Silicon Valley oppose urban sprawl for many reasons, but not, contrary to what John M. Quigley asserts, to keep housing scarce and prices high.

The financial turmoil of the late 1990s prompted a broad search for tools and techniques for detecting and preventing financial crises, and more recent episodes of instability have high lighted the importance of continuous monitoring of financial systems as a tool for preventing crises. This...

Investment has grown rapidly in China in recent years, reaching more than 40 percent of GDP. Despite good progress on bank and enterprise reforms, weaknesses remain that could contribute to inefficient investment decisions. Manufacturing, infrastructure, and real estate have been the drivers of...

Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....

The paper explores how the standard consumption-CAPM fares in pricing housing returns and regional rental income streams in a cross-section of regions. In particular, we estimate the Euler equations associated with the gross housing returns inclusive of price appreciations and rents jointly for...

Data for 116 California communities reveal considerable variation in changes in the value of owner-occupied homes during 2005-2010, variation that is related to the price/rent ratios that existed in 2005, number of rental properties in the community, increase in home values between 2000 and...

In this study, we analyze why U.S. commercial banks failed during the recent financial crisis. We find that proxies for commercial real estate investments, as well as traditional proxies for the CAMELS components, do an excellent job in explaining the failures of banks that were closed during...

This is one of the first researches on price differentials of green buildings in Asia. Using a rich set of data on condominium transactions and mandatory evaluation of environmental performance in Tokyo, we estimate the effects of itemized green scores on transaction prices. Although green...

Sharp increase in house prices combined with the extraordinary Chinese lending growth during 2009 has led to concerns of an emerging real estate bubble. We find that, for China as a whole, the current levels of house prices do not seem significantly higher than would be justified by underlying...

The financial crisis showed, once again, that neglecting real estate booms can have disastrous consequences. In this paper, we spell out the circumstances under which a more active policy agenda on this front would be justified. Then, we offer tentative insights on the pros and cons as well as...