Using data on a large sample of land transactions, this paper develops quarterly national land price indices for residential, commercial, and industrial land use categories over the 20 years period from 1991 to 2009. We find significant differences in variability across land uses, with...

We study whether tax considerations are an important determinant of commercial mortgage default. We also study whether large lenders are better informed, or better at interpreting information for lending purposes, and hence have lower foreclosure rates; whether lenders have more information on...

In this paper we exploit loan level data combining foreclosure histories with information about the revenues and expenses associated with the ongoing management and eventual sale of financially distressed loans to estimate the magnitude of realized excess returns on commercial mortgages. Our...

The 10-year Treasury rate has long been considered the primary determinant of 30-year mortgage interest rates. The contemporaneous 10-year LIBOR swap rate is shown to better explain the contemporaneous mortgage rate than the contemporaneous 10-year Treasury rate. This result appears to hold over...

We study the relations between governance mechanisms (internal and external), conference call voluntary disclosures (incidence and length), and CEO compensation using hand-collected data on conference calls, corporate governance, and compensation. We hypothesize and show that institutions push...