Download or read book Essays on the Consumption and Investment Decisions of Households in the Presence of Housing and Human Capital written by Sebastien Betermier and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in which I study the consumption and investment decisions of households in the presence of two major asset classes: housing and human capital. In the first essay, I analyze how the dual consumption-investment nature of housing affects the consumption dynamics of households. A key feature of the housing market is that for most households, the consumption and investment benefits of housing are non-separable. I propose a tractable theoretical framework to understand the impact of this constraint on the consumption allocation of homeowners who would ideally like to own just a fraction of their home. For these homeowners, the relative cost of living in their home is not just the imputed rental cost. It also includes an opportunity cost of having an unbalanced financial portfolio. This cost varies substantially over time, and it is especially high in good times, when available investment opportunities yield high returns and homeowners allocate a high fraction of their wealth to current consumption. As a result, this cost dampens variations in the level of their housing consumption, and it amplifies variations in both their level of non-housing consumption and the composition of their consumption baskets. I then test empirically this theory in the second essay. Using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I test the hypothesis that homeowners who face a high opportunity cost choose ceteris paribus a low housing consumption volatility. I also develop a method to identify these constrained homeowners by comparing their characteristics to those of a subset of unconstrained homeowners: the landlords. The results are consistent with the predictions of the model. First, the characteristics of homeowners that determine how constrained they are in the model are strong predictors of those homeowners who choose to be landlords in the data. For example, homeowners with a low level of risk aversion, little value for housing consumption, and a long horizon are relatively more likely to be landlords. Second, I find evidence that the more constrained homeowners adjust their level of housing consumption much less over time. In the third essay, which was developed in collaboration with Thomas Jansson, Christine Parlour, and Johan Walden, we investigate the relationship between workers' labor income and their investment decisions. Using a detailed Swedish data set on employment and portfolio holdings we estimate wage volatility and labor productivity for Swedish industries and, motivated by theory, we show that highly labor productive industries are more likely to pay workers variable wages. We also find that both levels and changes in wage volatility are significant in explaining changes in household investment portfolios. A household going from an industry with low wage volatility to one with high volatility will ceteris paribus decrease its portfolio share of risky assets by 25%, i.e., 7,750 USD. Similarly, a household that switches from a low labor productivity industry to one with high labor productivity decreases its risky asset share by 20%. Our results suggest that human capital risk is an important determinant of household portfolio holdings.

Download or read book Essays on Housing and Macroeconomics written by Guozhong Zhu and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies households' housing decision in the presence of income risks, and its implication on within-cohort income/consumption inequality and the nature of income risks facing households. It is composed of three chapters. The first chapter presents evidence from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Consumer Expenditure Survey (PSID) that housing consumption and housing investment are negatively affected by income risks. Within a household portfolio choice model, the negative effect can be attributed to the illiquidity of housing investment and the positive correlation between house price and income. The second chapter provides empirical evidence that the secular rise of income and consumption inequalities in the United States is age-dependent. It is more significant among younger households. With this feature, biasedness arises from the traditional methodology of decomposing inequality into age effect, year effect and cohort effect. A simple but effective remedy for the problem is proposed. The third chapter of the dissertation studies the age-profile of within-cohort income/consumption inequality, using the methodology proposed in the second chapter. It documents the age-profile of housing consumption inequality which is almost flat. This stands in contrast to the well-documented fact that within-cohort nonhousing consumption inequality rises with age, which has been argued to be evidence for persistent, uninsurable income shocks to households. This argument is challenged by the finding that housing consumption inequality has a flat age-profile. Within the framework of standard lifecycle model, the coexistence of rising nonhousing consumption inequality and flat housing consumption inequality constitutes a puzzle. A potential resolution lies in the negative effect of income uncertainty on housing decision which diminishes with age, as shown in the first chapter of the dissertation.

Download or read book Essays on the Household level Effects of House Price Growth written by Claudia Ayanna Sitgraves and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the effects of fluctuations in housing values on household saving and investment decisions. Chapter 1 examines the relationship between changes in housing values and household saving decisions. Fluctuations in housing values may affect household saving and consumption by increasing households' perceived wealth, or by relaxing borrowing constraints. Moreover, the increased liquidity of home equity during the recent housing boom may have led household behavior to respond more than in past years to changes in housing wealth. This chapter is the first analysis to provide evidence from household-level microdata suggesting that the housing wealth effect may have increased in line with increased access to housing-collateralized debt. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the years 1984 - 2003, I estimate an average elasticity of household active saving with respect to MSA-level house prices of -0.222, which corresponds to a 1 cent decrease in annual active saving when housing wealth increases by 1 dollar. When I estimate housing wealth effects separately between 1984 and 1990, and between 1996 and 2003, I find smaller effects during the earlier period, but large and significant effects during the later period. During the later period, I estimate an average elasticity of household active saving with respect to MSA-level house prices of -1.044, which corresponds to a 3 cent decrease in annual active saving when housing wealth increases by 1 dollar. Further evidence comparing the magnitude of the wealth effect between different subpopulations -- older homeowners versus younger homeowners, and recent homebuyers versus those with longer tenure -- suggests that a relaxation of liquidity constraints, rather than changes in the composition of the homeowner population, is a central factor contributing to the increase in the housing wealth effect. Chapter 2 explores the connection between growth in housing values, uncertainty over future housing values, and property owners' investments in housing. Residential housing is a significant share of most American households' asset holdings. As such, the decision to build, to buy, or to make significant improvements to a home is driven not only by consumption considerations, but is also an investment decision. By modeling property owners' housing investment decisions using a framework of optimal capital investment where investments are irreversible and there is uncertainty in future asset values, this analysis theoretically predicts and empirically estimates the extent to which property owners respond to changes in the profitability of housing investment by making investments in their stock of housing. Using a unique dataset of residential sales, geographic information, and the universe of building permits issued in Los Angeles between 1999 and 2008, and focusing on nonresident landlords and "improver-movers"--Owner-occupiers who make improvements to their properties and subsequently sell the property, I find that when housing values increase, property owners are more likely to make capital investments, and that the value and square footage of these investments is larger. When house price volatility is high, property owners are less likely to make investments. However, conditional on the decision to invest, the value and square footage of investments is larger. This result is shown to be a consequence of property owners' optimally delaying capital investment when uncertainty over future prices is high. Chapter 3 documents the extent to which residential real estate development is cyclical - exhibiting periods of rapid expansion followed by periods of rapid contraction - using New York City as a case study. This chapter provides an overview of residential development activity in New York City during the years 2000 - 2008. In this analysis, I describe the effects of this real estate "boom" on the housing market in New York City during these years, and characterize the long-term effects of the "boom" and subsequent "bust" in residential development on the composition of the City's housing stock. Economic theories of cyclicality in real estate markets, outlined in this chapter, show that uncertainty over the exact timing of price declines coupled with a long development lag can lead to buildings being completed and new units entering the market even as prices decline. Although the elasticity of housing supply is lower in New York City than in other areas, building activity tends to follow a boom-and-bust pattern similar to other areas. Neighborhoods with higher levels of amenities experienced more growth in residential housing supply, and public involvement in development activity (both to facilitate and to restrict development) became less important for builders as the boom progressed. As building activity slows, City officials and developers are taking steps to ensure that stalled construction sites, rather than becoming eyesores and safety hazards, are preserved for future use.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics written by Annika Bacher and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three independent essays in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics. They all explore how family structure affects investment choices and labor market outcomes of individuals. The first chapter, Housing and Savings Behavior Across Family Types, studies how family structure in the form of marital status and changes thereof affect housing demand. I develop a life-cycle model of housing and financial portfolio choice with dynamic and heterogeneous family types that I calibrate to household survey data from the United States. My findings indicate that divorce risk encourages precautionary savings of couples and reduces their demand risky assets and for indivisible housing. Prospective marriage, lower income levels and larger exposure to income fluctuations prevent singles from becoming homeowners. As a result, abstracting from distinct family types overstates the effectiveness of housing policies such as lowering property taxes and reducing housing transaction costs by up to over 100%. This misspecification is largest among young households, who are most likely to be single and whose marital transition risk is highest. In contrast, regulations that facilitate stock market participation help to foster wealth accumulation, because they encourage investment in high return assets that are cheaper to liquidate in the event of a marital or labor income shock. In the second chapter, The Gender Investment Gap over the Life-Cycle, I document with data from the Survey of Consumer Finances that single women hold on average less risky portfolios than single men. To understand the sources of this "Gender Investment Gap", I develop a life-cycle model of portfolio choice that allows for gender differences along observable characteristics and stochastic processes. The model is able to replicate the empirical patterns without introducing gender heterogeneity in preferences. Counterfactual simulations reveal that lower income levels and larger household sizes (mainly through the presence of children) of single women make it optimal for them to invest less risky. Hence, the gender wage gap gets amplified because it results in investment behavior that pays on average lower returns. Importantly, not only current-period income levels and number of household members help to explain this finding but also expectations over their future realizations. The third chapter, Joint Search over the Life-Cycle, co-authored with Philipp Grübener and Lukas Nord, focuses on labor market outcomes and couples. Specifically, we study how intra-household insurance against individual job loss through increased spousal labor market participation, also called the added worker effect, varies over the life cycle. First, we show in U.S. data that the added worker effect is much stronger for young than for old households. A stochastic life cycle model of two-member households with job search in a frictional labor market is capable of replicating this finding. The model suggests that a lower added worker effect for the old is driven primarily by better insurance through asset holdings. Human capital differences between employed young and old contribute to the difference but are quantitatively less important, while differences in job arrival rates play a limited role.

Download or read book Handbook of the Economics of Finance written by G. Constantinides and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2003-11-04 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arbitrage, State Prices and Portfolio Theory / Philip h. Dybvig and Stephen a. Ross / - Intertemporal Asset Pricing Theory / Darrell Duffle / - Tests of Multifactor Pricing Models, Volatility Bounds and Portfolio Performance / Wayne E. Ferson / - Consumption-Based Asset Pricing / John y Campbell / - The Equity Premium in Retrospect / Rainish Mehra and Edward c. Prescott / - Anomalies and Market Efficiency / William Schwert / - Are Financial Assets Priced Locally or Globally? / G. Andrew Karolyi and Rene M. Stuli / - Microstructure and Asset Pricing / David Easley and Maureen O'hara / - A Survey of Behavioral Finance / Nicholas Barberis and Richard Thaler / - Derivatives / Robert E. Whaley / - Fixed-Income Pricing / Qiang Dai and Kenneth J. Singleton.

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Life cycle Investment Decisions written by Yu Zhang (Applied economist) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wealth and Homeownership written by Mariacristina Rossi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-27 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In almost every country, wealth is predominantly constituted by housing equity, but what are the possible risks and how does wealth accumulation vary across countries? In this timely book, Rossi and Sierminska analyse the complex relationship between gender, wealth and homeownership. By providing a conceptual framework to insert homeownership and housing decisions within an economic rationale, the authors explore how gender and family types have shaped wealth accumulation and homeownership.

Download or read book Household Housing Decisions Under Uncertainty written by Zheng Duan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real estate is the largest component in most American households' portfolios. Prior studies have shown both negative and positive relations between uncertainty and households' housing decisions. This dissertation makes an effort to reconcile the differences in the literature through theoretical and empirical work that links uncertainty and households' housing decisions from a real options perspective. In the first chapter, I provide novel empirical evidence to show the importance of uncertainty in explaining households' several housing decisions - housing consumption, housing investment and mortgage default. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, I find that the effect of uncertainty has opposite signs on housing purchase decisions depending on the type of purchase (primary residence or investment property). I also find that uncertainty contributes to households' default decisions beyond other factors that have previously been identified in the literature. In addition to identifying the sign of the effect of uncertainty, I show that the uncertainty effect varies depending on the household's risk aversion, which is consistent with the predictions from a theoretical real options perspective. The second chapter introduces a real options type of model to explain from a theoretical perspective why the effect of uncertainty on households' home purchase decisions can depend on the type of a home purchase. Based on a real options approach introduced in Miao and Wang (2007) the model captures the dual nature of housing as a consumption good and an investment vehicle. It explains the uncertainty effect on the optimal timing of home purchase decisions either as a consumption good or as an investment. Unlike previous studies that rely on risk-neutral assumptions in the valuations of real options in explaining uncertainty effect on households' decisions, the model recognizes idiosyncratic risks and households' precautionary saving motives which allow the effect of uncertainty to vary across different degrees of risk-aversion. The third chapter introduces a real options type of model to explain the effect of uncertainty on households' default decisions. Unlike previous studies that focus on the link between uncertainty and investment decisions,the model shows the usefulness of a real options approach in explaining households' default decisions. The model predicts a positive relation between uncertainty and households' default decisions, which is consistent with the empirical results from the first chapter.

Download or read book Essays in Household Finance and Housing Economics written by Cindy K. Soo and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Asset Allocation written by Yang Su and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With high-quality household level asset holding data becoming available as well as the exponential increase in computing power, there is a growing literature that studies how households make investment decisions facing various types of uninsurable background risks. In this dissertation, I build theoretical models and conduct empirical studies to investigate different problems on household asset allocation. In chapter 1, I build a life-cycle model of portfolio choice with endogenous labor supply and a fixed cost of labor market participation to incorporate both the extensive and intensive mar- gins of labor supply decisions. I show that the risky asset holdings of young agents (agents younger than 45-year-old) are lower when compared to a model that only incorporates the intensive margin of labor supply. The risky asset holdings of young agents are further reduced and become hump-shaped when two additional features are included to the model: 1) endogenous Social Security accumulation and 2) a small possibility of a zero-income state. These two features increase the uncertainties faced by the agents while the fixed cost of labor market participation reduces the agents's ability to use labor supply to buffer against future income uncertainties. My model therefore reduces the gap between the empirical observations on household risky asset holdings and the predictions made by life-cycle models with endogenous labor supply. In chapter 2, we build a three-period model to study asset allocation ("how much to invest") and location ("which account to use") consequences when an economic agent has internal habit formation utility and has access to both an illiquid but tax-favored retirement account and a taxable personal account. We show that the incentive to maintain high consumption relative to the habit level and the restriction of only having access to the personal account before retirement induces the agent to hold a safer portfolio in her personal account and a riskier portfolio in her retirement account, in accordance with empirical findings on retirement asset allocation. We also show that retirement asset allocation and location decisions are affected by bequest motives and employer match, providing policy implications for retirement plan designers. In chapter 3, I provide updated estimations of the age profiles of stock market participation and risky share in the United States using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). This chapter is motivated by the recent findings of Fagereng, Gottlieb, and Guiso (2017) on Norwegian data that the age profiles of stock market participation rate and risky share become closer to theoretical predictions when they employ more precise empirical strategies to identify the age, cohort and year effects, control for demographic variables and use a Heckman selection model to control for the endogeneity of stock market participation decision. I apply the same empirical strategies in Fagereng et al. (2017) on the U.S. data. I find that the age profile of stock market participation rate is increasing over the life cycle instead of hump-shaped. The estimated conditional risky share, after controlling for selection, is higher than the risky shares reported in previous papers and it is slightly increasing over the life cycle.

Download or read book Essays in Housing Choices and Consumer Behavior written by Li Ma and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third chapter "The Impact of Borrowing Constraints on the Homeownership of Chinese Households" addresses the effect of borrowing constraints in the mortgage market on the tenure choice of Chinese households. The termination of housing allocation system in 1994 is one of the most important reforms in Chinese economy during past decades. Millions of Chinese households became homeowners after this housing reform, and a market-based housing system was established. Since then, Chinese housing mortgage market has boomed and by 2005 China had become the largest residential mortgage market in Asia. This chapter examines the effect of borrowing constraints in mortgage market on the tenure choice of Chinese households. The result shows that few Chinese households are constrained by the down payment criterion. With limited lending sources and a relatively high housing price-to-income ratio, they are more likely to be constrained by the income criterion. Empirical work indicates that a one thousand dollar increase in the family's permanent income increases the likelihood of owning a housing unit by 11.8%. Moreover, highly income-constrained households are 8.6% less likely to become homeowners.

Download or read book Essays on Consumption Saving and Wealth Inequality written by Fang Yang and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Household Investment Behaviour written by Mario Padula and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rethinking Housing Bubbles written by Steven D. Gjerstad and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original piece of work, Steven D. Gjerstad and Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith analyze the role of housing and its associated mortgage financing as a key element of economic cycles. The authors combine data from both laboratory and real markets to provide insight into the bubble propensity of real-world economic actors and use novel historical analysis on the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and all of the post-World War II recessions to establish the critical roles of housing, private-capital investment, and household and private institutional balance sheets in economic cycles. They develop a model that incorporates household balance sheets and bank balance sheets and offers insights based on this analysis concerning policy going forward, effectively changing the way economists think about economic cycles.

Download or read book Essays on Households Consumption and Saving Decisions written by Serafin Frache Derregibus and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Optimal Housing Consumption and Investment Decisions over the Life Cycle written by Holger Kraft and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We provide explicit solutions to life-cycle utility maximization problems involving dynamic decisions on investments in stocks and bonds, consumption of perishable goods, and the rental and the ownership of residential real estate. House prices, stock prices, interest rates, and the labor income of the decision-maker follow correlated stochastic processes. The explicit consumption and investment strategies are simple and intuitive and are thoroughly discussed and illustrated in the paper. A calibrated version of the model exhibits many interesting and realistic features. For example, due to a positive correlation between house prices and labor income, young individuals want little (or even negative) exposure to house price risk and tend to rent their home. Later in life, when human wealth declines, the desired housing investment increases and will eventually reach and exceed the desired housing consumption, suggesting that the individual should buy his home--and buy either additional housing units (for renting out) or house price linked financial assets. In the final years, preferences shift back to home rental. While our model involves continuous adjustments of the consumption of housing services and the exposure of wealth to house price risk, we demonstrate that the derived strategies are still useful if the housing positions are only reset infrequently. Our results suggest that markets for REITs or other financial contracts linked to house prices will lead to non-negligible improvements of welfare.