This paper looks at a broad array of evidence concerning the recent boom in home prices, and considers what this means for future home prices and the economy. It does not appear possible to explain the boom in terms of fundamentals such as rents or construction costs. A psychological theory,...

We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mispricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we...

Most institutional and individual portfolios are very undiversified in real estate: many hold no real estate at all, many have holdings highly concentrated in certain regions or types of real estate. The risk of these concentrated holdings is not hedged. We propose here that cash-settled futures...

Portfolio theory has been an important component of open economy macroeconomic models. In those models, it is essential to distinguish among several categories of assets, both foreign and domestic, and to specify the demands and supplies. This framework has become increasingly relevant....

Least absolute deviations (LAD) estimation of linear time-series models is considered under conditional heteroskedasticity and serial correlation. The limit theory of the LAD estimator is obtained without assuming the finite density condition for the errors that is required in standard LAD...

Statistics are developed to test for the presence of an asymptotic discontinuity (or infinite density or peakedness) in a probability density at the median. The approach makes use of work by Knight (1998) on L_1 estimation asymptotics in conjunction with non-parametric kernel density estimation...