In the absence of a bankruptcy law, private debt-collection remedies generally result in an ad hoc disposal of the debtor's assets that reduces the aggregate value of creditors' claims. We show that creditors will often choose not to write private contracts that would prevent this inefficient...

Despite housing's economic importance, little has been written on how foreclosures and home prices interact in a framework that includes macroeconomic and housing variables such as employment, permits or sales. Panel VAR results for quarterly state-level data indicate that price-foreclosure...

This article demonstrates the importance of separating the bundled good of housing into land and improvements, arguing that changes in a property's overall value will depend critically on how much of its total value is contained in the land, a proportion we call land leverage. The importance of...