We use city-level data to analyze the relationship between homeowner borrowing patterns and house-price dynamics. Our principal finding is that in cities where a greater fraction of homeowners are highly leveraged--i.e., have high loan-to-value ratios--house prices react more sensitively to...

We construct a simple general equilibrium model in which agents borrow to purchase housing and secure their loans with this long-lived asset. As the housing price falls defaulting becomes a weaker signal of (poor) credit quality, since wealthier agents are forced to default. If housing prices...

This paper constructs a model for the evolution of a risky security that is consistent with a set of observed call option prices. It explicitly treats the fact that only a discrete data set can be observed in practice. The framework is general and allows for state dependent volatility and jumps....

We study the problem of going public in the presence of moral hazard, adverse selection and multiple trading periods. In the multi-period game managers strategically choose the level of extraction of private benefits and can develop a good reputation for expropriating low levels of private...

In this paper, we explore the features of affine term structure models that are empirically important for explaining the joint distribution of yields on short- and long-term interest rate swaps. We begin by showing that the family of N-factor affine models can be classified into N+1 non-nested...

This paper presents a first step towards a new theory of housing market fluctuations. We develop a life-cycle model where agents face credit constraints and their housing consumption is restricted to a discrete set of possibilities. The market interaction of young credit constrained agents...

This paper shows that the empirical movements of stock prices can be explained directly by fundamentals. The real stock market rate of return is shown to closely track the real incremental rate of profit of the corporate sector, with the two rates displaying similar means and standard...

In this paper we present a maximum likelihood estimator of non-linear term-structure models based on a panel-data approach, which facilitates examining a broader class of term-structure models compared to the majority of recent panel-data literature. It is assumed that all zero-coupon yields are...

This paper formed part of the Bank of England's contribution to a study by the G10 Deputies on saving, investment and real interest rates. It investigates a technique which allows economic times series to be decomposed into common trends and common cycles. This is applied to the movements of...

In this paper we show that it is invalid to use standard maximum likelihood procedures in estimating jump-diffusion models. The reason is that in jump-diffusion models the log-return is equivalent to a discrete mixture of N normally distributed variables, where N goes to infinity. Thus, from the...