Economists do not have reliable measures of current house values, let alone housing returns. This ignorance underlies the illiquidity of mortgage-backed securities, which in turn feeds back to deepen the sub-prime crisis. Using a massive new data tape of housing transactions in L.A., we...

We study the cyclical effects of the timing of durable goods purchases in a general equilibrium model in which both durable and non-durable goods are consumed and the durable good is lumpy. At the microeconomic level, the timing of durable goods purchases supplies some insulation for non-durable...

We study the cyclical effects of the timing of durable goods purchases in a general equilibrium model in which both durable and non-durable goods are consumed and the durable good is lumpy. At the microeconomic level, the timing of durable goods purchases supplies some insulation for nondurable...