This paper separates the roles of demand for housing services and belief about future house prices in a house price cycle, by utilizing a feature of user-cost-of-housing that it is sensitive to demand for housing services only. Optimality conditions of producing housing services determine...

Real estate agents play an important intermediary role in housing markets. We use a merged transaction dataset that identifies houses purchased by registered real estate agents (salespersons) and other buyers in Singapore to empirically test the hypothesis that real estate agents use information...

Using a novel data set, we study the soft information in subprime mortgages that is not verifiable by a third party, and its relationship with mortgage default. We find that lender effort to collect soft information is intertwined with borrower self-selection into subprime mortgages. We employ...

In the past decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. In this paper, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers' time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing...

The recently developed SADF and GSADF unit root tests of Phillips et al. (2011) and Phillips et al. (2015) have become popular in the literature for detecting exuberance in asset prices. In this paper, we examine through simulation experiments the effect of cross-sectional aggregation on the...

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...

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...

Central to recent debates on the "mis-pricing" in the housing market and the proactive policy of central bank is the determination of the "fundamental house price." This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that produces reduced-form dynamics that are consistent...

In this study we investigate spatial dimensions of housing-market dynamics in the City of Milwaukee by modeling the determinants of housing prices. From the 2003 Master Property data file of the city, two sets of owner-occupied single-family houses were randomly selected (one to construct the...