The revival of strong capital flows to emerging economies in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09 has rekindled the debate on the adverse effects of excessive capital inflows. We study the effects of official and illicit capital flows on Hong Kong, which is a small and open...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

This paper estimates a spatio-temporal model of house price changes in England, allowing for heterogeneity in spatial effects between districts and the separation of the spatial dimension from the impact of common factors. We model house price growth from January 1995 to August 2016 across 325...

We model a home seller's pricing decision under a generally defined prospect value function. We show a simple disposition effect is caused by reference dependence, but it only exists when the agent is risk neutral. Diminishing sensitivity will lead to a two-way disposition effect by generating a...

This paper uses a simple model based on the board game Monopoly to analyze the drivers of house prices and wealth inequality. Simulations show that the inequality depends on the timing and distribution of home ownership, house price growth and wage growth. An extension of the classical game with...

This study investigates the spillover effect of corporate headquarters relocation on the local housing market. Using a comprehensive database to identify corporate relocation events in the U.S. from 1994 to 2017, we show that moving a corporate headquarters into a district is significantly...

The number 8, pronounced like 'prosperity,' is lucky in Chinese culture; 4, pronounced like 'death' is unlucky. Superstitious beliefs may influence asset prices if transaction participants have cultural preferences for specific numbers. We analyze the relationship between the presence of 8s and...

In 2012, several large firms began purchasing single-family homes with the stated intention of creating large portfolios of rental property. We present the first systematic evidence on how this new investor activity differs from that of other investors in the housing market. Many aspects of...

We show that profit-seeking institutional investors can provide valuable liquidity and spur the recovery of distressed housing markets. Using a quasi-natural experiment wherein investors purchased pre-packaged distressed home portfolios from the government-sponsored enterprises, we find that...

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...