Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

We re-examine the methods used in estimating comovements among U.S. regional home prices and find that there are insufficient moments to ensure a normal limit necessary for employing the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator. Hence, we propose applying the self- weighted quasi-maximum exponential...

Using proprietary data of all high-tech incubators in China, we study a new approach by government to implement industrial policy through market intermediaries instead of directly allocating resources. Exploiting a highly localized industrial policy that targets different ``strategic emerging...

Financial sophistication does not uniformly impact home ownership decisions. Sophisticated households are less likely to pay too high a mortgage rate and more likely to refinance when financially advantageous to do so but more likely to over pay for a house and less likely to default when...

With the increasing importance of the service-providing sectors, information from these sectors has become essential to the understanding of contemporary business cycles. This paper explores the usefulness of the transportation services output index (TSI) as an additional coincident indicator in...