In the U.S., 15 percent of households move in a given year. This result is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on gross flows within and between the two segments of the housing market - renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The gross flows between these two...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual post-war sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities – the peso problem – can affect the behaviour of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To that...

Survey respondents strongly disagree about return risks and, increasingly, macroeconomic uncertainty. This may have contributed to higher asset prices through increased use of collateralisation, which allows risk-neutral investors to realise perceived gains from trade. Investors with lower risk...

To understand the effects of regulation on mortgage risk, it is instructive to track the history of regulatory changes in a country rather than to rely entirely on cross-country evidence that can be contaminated by unobserved heterogeneity. However, in developed countries with fairly stable...

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

We specify several variants of a structural econometric model explaining mortgage interest rates and loan sizes simultaneously. The models are estimated by simultaneous equation methods with a sample of loan files originated from a French mortgage lender. They yield estimates of the...

We develop an OLG model aimed at explaining the joint determination of housing prices, rents, and interest rates, in an environment featuring a positive home ownership bias and individual borrowing limits that generate a mismatch between desired and available funds to finance housing purchases....