This paper examines the relationship between house prices and consumption, through the use of debt. Using unique Canadian household-level data that reports the uses of debt, we begin by looking at the relationship between house prices and debt. Using quantile regression, we find a positive and...

This paper studies the incentive costs of housing booms. We use the type and actual time stamps of 9.3 million credit card transactions by over 200,000 cardholders from a large commercial bank to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. After positive shocks to house prices, employees...

Expectations are central for housing decisions and heterogeneity in expectations is a robust feature of survey data. We study the implications of heterogeneity in house price growth expectations for the level of house prices. We feed the joint empirical distributions of income, wealth and...

We estimate the relationship between the returns on housing, stocks, and bonds, and simulate a variety of decumulation strategies incorporating reverse mortgages. We show that homeowner’s reversionary interest, the amount that can be borrowed through a reverse mortgage, is a surprisingly risky...

We investigate the determinants of a household's decision on whether to invest in risky financial assets. Financial theory suggests that with increasing labor income risk, the reluctance of households to hold stocks increases. We propose to measure income risk as the observed variation of...

What determines the risk structure of financial portfolios of German households? In this paper we estimate the determinants of the share of financial wealth invested in three broad risk classes. We employ a new econometric approach - the so called fractional multinomial logit model - which...

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

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...

I develop an equilibrium model of housing and default to jointly analyze the effects of bankruptcy and foreclosure policies. Heterogeneous households have access to mortgages and unsecured credit and can default separately on both types of debt. I show that the interaction between foreclosure...