Using individual-level data from the 1985-2011 American Housing Survey panel, this paper confirms that housing capital gains encourage transitions into self-employment. Additional findings suggest that this occurs at least in part because homeownership provides an accessible source of potential financing that serves as a form of insurance for aspiring homeownerentrepreneurs. The link between ho...

From the early ‘70s the Italian families improved their welfare, raising the national dwelling standard level. During the same period, for several reasons, the rental market share on the total housing stock decreased from 40% to less that 20%. The situation was mainly caused, on the one hand, by some structural changes introduced in the leasing contracts, and, on the other hand, by some incenti...

Homeownership, like baseball and hotdogs, is an integral part of the American culture. Over the past 70 years, the U.S. government has devoted significant public resources to encouraging and promoting homeownership. (See Housing Policies That Promote Homeownership for a summary of the various programs.) The percentage of households that live in housing units they own has risen from around 40 pe...

The 2005 American Housing Survey reveals that 11% of residents on the west coast of the USA live in gated communities. The trend is not confined to America: just about all new housing built in China over the last 10 years is gated, with neighbourhood walls, guards, owner-governance structures, fees and neighbourhood management and investment plans based not on the municipal government model but...

Recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investment to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision. This paper explores the theoretical justification for this technique. It points out that the logic justifying the technique for evaluating non-durable public good provision does not translate to the durable case. A model in which investmen...

t Wilkie's stochastic investment model and its variants have been increasingly applied by actuaries around the world to actuarial modeling and simulation. This paper performs time series outlier analysis on retail price inflation, which is the driving force of Wilkie's composite model. The data come from four developed countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The...

Conventional cage housing for laying hens evolved as a cost-effective egg production system. Complying with mandated hen housing alternatives would raise marginal production costs and require sizable capital investment. California data indicate that shifts from conventional cages to barn housing would likely cause farm-level cost increases of about 40% per dozen. The US data on production costs...

We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house prices during the past 20 years can be reproduced when expectations of future income growth as publis...