Documents

Stock Market Information and REIT Earnings Management PDF

This paper investigates the interaction between stock price movement and REIT earnings management. We examine whether information generated from stock price volatility influences managers' incentives to engage in earnings management.

Adjustable Balance Mortgage PDF

The Adjustable Balance Mortgage: Reducing the Value of the Put. A proposed new mortgage contract that endogenizes the risk of house price declines.

House Price Index Methodologies PDF

In 2005, both forbes.com and cnnmoney.com published online articles on the topic of the US’s most expensive housing markets. Each of the two articles constructed rankings of housing markets based on the price of a “typical” house, but the method of defining typical was quite different in the two surveys. The ranking by forbes.com used the US zip code as the area of analysis; that is, each zip code was defined as a distinct housing market. For each zip code, the survey constructed a median sales price, the price which is at the halfway point in a list of most expensive to least expensive units in that zip code. As forbes.com itself noted, the unit that has the median price can differ substantially from place to place, and comparing prices across these locations will be like comparing apples to oranges.

Temporal and Ethnic Decompositions of Homeownership Rates: Synthetic Cohorts Across Five Censuses PDF

Homeownership is widely seen as an indicator of social well-being. It is a mechanism for wealth accumulation, and there is some evidence that it creates positive externalities through increased maintenance, increased volunteerism and citizenship, and improved outcomes for children. There is also evidence that such externalities are actually priced in the market for neighboring properties which suggests that these beneficial externalities have value in the marketplace. Therefore, the fact that homeownership probabilities differ systematically across ethnic groups is cause for concern. The four ethnic groups are labeled, despite the inaccuracy that sometimes is inherent in such labels, as white, black, Hispanic and Asian. Three facts are evident: (1) Homeownership rates are rising for all four ethnic groups over time,with the exception of the early dip in the Hispanic rate, and the overall downward trend from 1980 to 1990 (2) the Homeownership rates of black, Hispanic and Asian households lag behind that of white households; (3) the relative lagging of these three non-white groups changes over time. In 1960, Hispanics had ownership rates well above those of blacks, but by 1980 the situation was reversed, while Asian households by the same decade had moved ahead of both Hispanics and blacks.