Applying the rational expectations hypothesis, this essay models the current value of a house as the conditional expectation of the discounted stream of housing services accruing to the owner of the house. The value of housing services is determined by neighborhood effects as well as the...

Although a broad-based increase in house prices has been observed over the past year, not everyone is convinced the rise of house prices will persist and lead to a steady recovery of the economy. The main reason for this skepticism is uncertainty about the "shadow inventory" foreclosed homes...

We study the distribution of savings from mortgage refinancing across income groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between February and June 2020, the difference in savings from refinancing between high- and low-income borrowers was 10 times higher than before. This was the result of two factors:...

We propose a model selection methodology for credit default modeling in the presence of a large number of variables and candidate models. Accurate credit default models are critical to financial institutions for making effective underwriting and pricing decisions in terms of profit maximization...

Although a broad-based increase in house prices has been observed over the past year, not everyone is convinced the rise of house prices will persist and lead to a steady recovery of the economy. The main reason for this skepticism is uncertainty about the "shadow inventory:" foreclosed homes...

In this study we use property-level transaction data to construct several different out-of-sample forecasts for the sales of individual homes in 10 counties in Florida. We utilize a number of common forecast combination methods and analyze the properties of their forecast errors. The results...