Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. We specify and estimate a life cycle model with risky labor income and house prices in which households face a discrete-continuous choice between renting and owning a house, whose sale is subject to transaction...

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. Using micro data from five economies, we estimate a life-cycle model with illiquid housing in which households face a discrete-continuous choice between renting and owning a house. We use the model to decompose...

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. We specify and estimate a life cycle model with risky labor income and house prices in which households face a discrete–continuous choice between renting and owning a house, whose sale is subject to...

The Mortensen-Pissarides model with unemployment benefits and taxes has been able to account for the variation in unemployment rates across countries but does not explain why geographical mobility is very low in some countries (on average, three times lower in Europe than in the U.S.). We build...

The recent surge in property values in China has been similar to the surge in the U.S before the crash in 2007. This raises concerns about whether China is destined to have a crash as well. We estimate similar models of property values for the two countries, in order to compare price dynamics...

We quantify racial differences in the total rate of return on housing in a nationally representative sample of homeowners from 1974-2021. We develop a new method to estimate the rental value of each owner-occupied house, using a house's resale value to proxy for unobservable quality. Black and...