During the Greek crisis the wealth tax on real estate (WTRE) was increased four-fold as a percentage of GDP in order to boost fiscal revenues. This increase contributed to an essentially complete freeze of the real estate market, a considerable drop in real estate prices, and a substantial...

In this chapter, we review and discuss the large body of research that has developed over the past 10-plus years that explores the interconnection of macroeconomics, finance, and housing. We focus on three major topics—housing and the business cycle, housing and portfolio choice, and housing...

This paper quantitatively accounts for the cyclical dynamics of key macroeconomic housing and mortgage market variables using a tractable, searchtheoretic model of housing with equilibrium mortgage default. To explain these dynamics, the model highlights the importance of liquidity spirals that...

Using detailed micro data at the ZIP code level, this article explores the regional variation in housing market performance to account for the severity of the Great Recession. The granularity of the data, relative to a more traditional analysis at the county level, is useful for evaluating the...

Using a measure of local long-run growth prospects, I uncover a novel link between economic fundamentals and prices of a segmented asset class, housing. While excess housing returns are positively associated with the level of growth prospects, housing valuations (price-to-rent ratios) are...

The global financial crisis of the past decade has shaken the research and policy worlds out of their belief that housing markets are mostly benign and immaterial for understanding economic cycles. Instead, a growing consensus recognizes the central role that housing plays in shaping economic...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of search risk in the housing market. To do so, I introduce a tractable directed search model of housing with multidimensional buyer and seller heterogeneity. I incorporate this framework in an incomplete markets macroeconomic model with...

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibrium model of housing. The model has two key elements not previously considered in existing quantitative macro studies of housing finance: aggregate business cycle risk, and a realistic wealth distribution driven in the model by bequest...