The 1980s and 1990s have been turbulent times in the U.S. market for single-family homes. For most of the previous two decades, housing prices across states and metropolitan areas moved together and increased slowly in real terms while regional differences generally remained small. The 1980s and...

This paper reviews the development of index-based futures and options markets. The thesis is that, while the growth of these markets to date has been dramatic, their development could be extended much further, if some problems of measurement can be solved.