Do investors reach for yield when interest rates are low, and how does this behavior influence house prices? This paper uses the unique setting of 17th-18th century Amsterdam to answer this question, using newly-collected archival data on investment portfolios and the universe of property...

We infer the role of price expectations in forming the U.S. housing boom in the early-2000s from examining housing inventories. We use a reduced form model to show that agents invest in vacant homes when they anticipate prices will increase. Empirically, vacancy can discriminate between price...

We examine whether asset pricing theory can explain residential property prices. Using quarterly data for Local Government Areas in Sydney from 1991 to 2006, we find little evidence that variations in price: rent ratios anticipate future real rent growth. Instead changes in price: rent ratios...

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with possible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is...

Asset prices in general, and real house prices in particular, are often characterized by a nonlinear data-generating process which displays mildly explosive behavior in some periods. Here, we investigate the emergence of explosiveness in the dynamics of real house prices and the role played by...

We add arbitraging middlemen - investors who attempt to profit from buying low and selling high - to a canonical housing market search model. Flipping tends to take place in sluggish and tight, but not in moderate, markets. To follow is the possibility of multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium,...

Explaining asset price booms poses a difficult question for researchers in macroeconomics: how can large and persistent price growth be explained in the absence large and persistent variation in fundamentals? This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model...

Explaining asset price booms poses a difficult question for researchers in macroeconomics: how can large and persistent price growth be explained in the absence large and persistent variation in fundamentals? This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model...