House prices in the United States rose 14 percent in real terms during the 1990s; by historical standards, this was strong performance. Some analysts have worried that this performance was too strong, perhaps indicating an asset bubble, and could not be explained by fundamentals. This paper...

The refinance shares reported by Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and the National Mortgage News (NMN) have differed by up to 21 percentage points between 1990 and 2005. If a lender’s...

The availability of resources allows for the rapid and cost-effective delivery of a construction project. For rebuilding programmes after a disaster, the need for better understanding of factors affecting resource availability and their potential impacts on resourcing outcomes can be of crucial...

Using several large data sets of mortgage loans originated between 2004 and 2007, we find that in the prime mortgage market, banks generally sold low-default-risk loans into the secondary market while retaining higher-default-risk loans in their portfolios. In contrast, these lenders retained...

Utilizing individual mortgage data, we find that borrowers with points are less likely to refinance, and when they do, they take longer to refinance. This finding supports the separating equilibrium prediction of earlier studies that borrowers with higher (lower) refinancing costs self-select...

Post-disaster reconstruction is likely to suffer resource shortages and supply disruptions. The devastating Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008 in China served as a typical example. After the catastrophe, resource problems such as price escalation and market inflation posed a significant...

Price changes of primary returns of Chinese stock market are analyzed over a period of about 8 years. The probability distribution of relative changes in returns satisfies the power–law form. However, the distribution is not consistent with the analysis of US and other stock markets that seem...

Post-disaster reconstruction is likely to suffer resource shortages and supply disruptions. The devastating Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008 in China served as a typical example. After the catastrophe, resource problems such as price escalation and market inflation posed a significant...

We study individual ability to memorize and recall information about friendship networks using a combination of experiments and survey-based data. In the experiment subjects are shown a network, in which their location is exogenously assigned, and they are then asked questions about the network...