Thinly-traded private assets do not fit into the traditional finance paradigm of a liquid and well-functioning market where trading is continuous and instantaneous. Since private assets cannot be bought and sold easily, they bear liquidity risk. Classical finance theories cannot properly gauge...

Existing research on racial discrimination in mortgage lending has overwhelmingly focused on whether black applicants are more likely to be denied for credit than comparable white applicants. This study investigates whether the approved black applicants are likely charged higher interest rates...

This paper provides a formal analysis on a well-known issue of the housing market observable transaction prices are a biased indication of the true market condition if significant numbers of listed properties are delisted without sale. We provide a closed-form formula to identify and correct...

This paper documents women on average pay more for mortgages than men. The disparity cannot be fully explained by traditional variables such as mortgage features, borrower characteristics, and market conditions. While the persistence of gender disparity may suggest discrimination, we offer a...

Investment in thinly-traded private assets involves liquidity risk. Existing literature provides limited guidance as it mainly focuses on publicly-traded security assets such as stocks and bonds. This paper develops an analytical tool for quantifying liquidity risk of private assets. Using...

Modern Portfolio Theory is a single-period model developed for the efficient securities market, in which asset prices are implicitly assumed to follow a random walk. It is widely agreed that real estate does not fit into the efficient market paradigm; however, mixed-asset portfolio analysis...

It is well documented in the literature that long-run asset prices do not follow the random walk, and their returns are not independent and identically-distributed (i.i.d.) over time. But how can this notion – long-run returns and volatilities being horizon dependent - be incorporated into...

Due to the heterogeneous nature of real estate assets, housing market is characterized by a sequential search and seller's optimal strategies. This paper provides a side-by-side performance comparison of the two competing stopping rules (i.e., the reservation rule and the number rule) in the...

This paper develops a formal model to examine the effect of changing market conditions and individuals' selling constraints on expected selling price and time-on-market. Using the concept of Relative Liquidity Constraint (RLC) - a stochastic variable that captures the randomness of future...

Real estate transactions are often established through financing. We study the effect of financing on property prices. We show that properties can transact at prices well above their collateral values. Therefore, the commonly used loan-to-value (LTV) ratio suffers a bias that can significantly...