We study the impact of S&P index membership on REIT stock returns. Given the hybrid nature of REITs, their returns may become more like those of other indexed stocks and less like those of their underlying properties. The existing literature does not offer clear predictions on these potential...

This paper studies the impact of transparency in the mortgage market on the underlying real estate markets. We show that geographic transparency in the secondary mortgage market, which implies geographic risk based pricing in the primary market, can limit risk-sharing and make house prices more...

This paper establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest only, negative amortization or subprime, mortgages, and the underlying house prices. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial...

With private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS), investors bore default risk; while this risk should have been priced, as systemic risk grew, the pricing of risk did not increase. This paper attempts to explain why this happened. We point to market institutions' incentive misalignments that...

We investigate the market prices of assets in fixed supply whose purchase is typically financed through non-recourse loans. The largest and most common asset in this category is real estate. We demonstrate two features of such markets: Lenders' underpricing of the put option contained in...

In this paper we offer direct evidence that financial intermediation does impact underlying asset markets. We develop a specific observable symptom of a banking system that underprices the put option imbedded in non-recourse asset-backed lending. Using a dataset for 19 countries and over 500...

Lenders are frequently accused of mispricing the put option imbedded in non-recourse lending (Herring and Wachter, 1999 and 2003). Prior research (Pavlov and Wachter, 2004) shows one lender's incentives to underprice. Here we identify the conditions for a market-wide underpricing equilibrium. We...