This paper analyzes the risk-taking behavior of financial intuitions that have guarantees (e.g., banks with deposit insurance or Government Sponsored Enterprises with implicit guarantees) and/or institutions that find it beneficial to develop a reputation for not taking risk. For instance, banks...

It has been widely assumed that there was a bubble in the U.S. housing market after 1999. This paper analyzes the extent to which that was true. We define a bubble as: (1) a regime shift that is characterized by a change in the properties of deviations from the fundamentals of house price...

This study compares apartment submarkets within a major European city. The price behavior of the Dublin, Ireland apartment market is tested using hedonic models and aggregate and disaggregate data. The results strongly indicate that the modeling of apartment markets at the disaggregate level...

Capitalization of fiscal packages at the local level is often criticized as a demand side phenomenon. We provide a theoretical model in which capitalization depends on the elasticity of housing supply and demand. When supply is perfectly elastic, capitalization does not persist over time. Using...

We propose two alternative models to estimate fundamental prices on real estate markets. The first model is based on a no-arbitrage condition between renting and buying. The second model interprets the period costs as the result of market equilibrium between housing demand and supply. We...

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

The dynamic effect of a hazardous waste site is analyzed by investigating the causal relationship between housing appreciation rates and house location in relation to a hazardous waste site using resale data from individual sales transactions in Dallas County, Texas. The results indicate that in...

Building on Flavin and Nakagawa (2008), this paper models household optimal consumption and portfolio selection when consumption services are generated by both non-durable consumption and by holding a durable good housing. Housing is illiquid in that a non-convex adjustment cost must be paid...

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study "Sites and Services" projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...