We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth...

This paper presents a dynamic theory of housing market fluctuations. It develops a life-cycle model where households are heterogeneous with respect to income and preferences, and mortgage lending is restricted by a down-payment requirement. The market interaction of young credit-constrained...

We propose a life-cycle model of the housing market with a property ladder and a credit constraint. We focus on equilibria which replicate the facts that credit constraints delay some households' first home purchase and force other households to buy a home smaller than they would like. The model...

This paper presents a dynamic theory of housing market fluctuations. It develops a life-cycle model where households are heterogeneous with respect to income and preferences, and mortgage lending is restricted by a down-payment requirement. The market interaction of young credit-constrained...

This paper describes an equilibrium life-cycle model of housing where nonconvex adjustment costs lead households to adjust their housing choice infrequently and by large amounts when they do so. In the cross-sectional dimension, the model matches the wealth distribution; the age profiles of...

We investigate whether expectations that are not fully rational have the potential to explain the evolution of house prices and the price-to-rent ratio in the United States. First, a Lucas type asset-pricing model solved under rational expectations is used to derive a fundamental value for house...

We propose a life-cycle model of the housing market with a property ladder and a credit constraint. We focus on equilibria which replicate the facts that credit constraints delay some households' first home purchase and force other households to buy a home smaller than they would like. The model...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure...

The housing market is subject to search frictions in buying and selling houses. This paper documents the role of inflows (new listings) and outflows (sales) in explaining the volatility and co-movement of housing-market variables. An 'ins versus outs' decomposition shows that both inflows and...

I develop a dynamic search model of the housing market in which prices, determined by auction, exhibit greater volatility than prices in the search and matching model with Nash bargaining from the literature. This helps solve the puzzle of excess volatility of house prices. The outcomes of the...