Much progress has been achieved in the valuation of call options and interest-rate caps on default-free mortgages. The evidence suggests that the observed term structure of interest rates (the full structure, not just the end points) and a reasonable estimate of the volatility of spot rates is...

Current tax law provides tax advantages to owner-occupied housing that increase with a household's income. This well understood fact has led to periodic proposals to substitute a tax credit equal to, say, 25 percent of housing-related expenses for their current deductibility. Because all of the...

This paper presents calculations of the impacts of two levels of mortgage revenue bonds (MRBs) on: (1) yields on home mortgages, tax-exempt bonds and taxable bonds, (2) the allocation of the American fixed capital stock among residential (by three tax brackets), business, and state and local...

In contrast to the conventional wisdom, real estate activity in the aggregate is not disfavored by the 1986 Tax Act. Within the broad aggregate, however, widely different impacts are to be expected. Regular rental and commercial activity will be slightly disfavored, while historic and old...

This study extends recent work that developed and tested economic models of the joint decisions of household formation and homeownership. The cost of shelter is an important determinant of whether youth live independently (apart from parents and other nonrelated adults), and the cost of...

The securitization of fixed-rate mortgages suggests that the FRA/VA market was fully integrated with capital markets by the early l98Os and that the conventional market moved toward integration during the l98Os. Assuming full integration of FHA/VA5 via the GNMA securitization process, we first...

This paper presents a stochastic pricing model of a unique, path-dependent lease instrument common in the United Kingdom and numerous commonwealth countries, the upward-only adjusting lease. In this lease, the rental rate is fixed at lease commencement but will be reset to the market rate at...

This paper suggests that the decline in equity prices, and thus in Tobin's average q, during the 1970s may be attributable to changes in expected relative factor prices. More specifically, q is shown to be a negative function of the extent to which current relative factor price expectations...

Real metropolitan house prices have been quite volatile during the 1977-91 period, with half of our 30 areas having annual increases of above 15 percent in a single year and a third having decreases greater than 7.5 percent. Drawing on Capozza and Helsley's models of real land prices, we express...

We consider retail leases with landlord overages options, with tenant renewal options, with both and with neither. We illustrate how the ratio of initial expected sales to the sales threshold can be manipulated to equate the value of the landlord overage options to that of the tenant renewal...