Research Lab

A rent guarantee insurance (RGI) policy makes a limited number of rent payments to the landlord on behalf of an insured tenant unable to pay rent due to a negative income or health expenditure shock. We introduce RGI in a rich quantitative equilibrium model of housing insecurity and show it increases welfare by improving risk sharing across idiosyncratic and aggregate states of the world, reducing the need for a large security deposits, and reducing homelessness which imposes large costs on society.

I propose a dynamic equilibrium model of the rental markets that endogenously gives rise to defaults on rents and evictions. In the model, eviction protections make it harder to evict delinquent renters, but higher default costs to landlords increase equilibrium rents. I quantify the model using micro data on evictions, rents, and homelessness. I find that stronger eviction protections exacerbate housing insecurity and lower welfare. The key empirical driver of this result is the persistent nature of risk underlying rent delinquencies.

Professional house price forecast data are consistent with a rational model where agents must learn about the parameters of the house price growth process and the underlying state of the housing market. Slow learning about the long-run mean generates overreaction to forecast revisions and a modest response of forecasts to lagged realizations. Heterogeneity in signals and priors about the long-run mean helps the model account for cross-sectional dispersion in forecasts. Introducing behavioral biases helps improve the model's predictions for short-horizon overreaction and dispersion.

Working from home resulted in a sharp contraction in office demand. We built a valuation model to find that the office stock lost about 45% in value. More for low-quality buildings and in cities with a larger IT sector and less for trophy buildings. We discuss the implications for mortgage lenders and the vitality of cities.

Bank balance sheet lending is commonly viewed as the predominant form of lending. We document and study two margins of adjustment that are usually absent from this view using microdata in the $10 trillion U.S. residential mortgage market. We first document the limits of the shadow bank substitution margin: shadow banks substitute for traditional “deposit-taking” banks in loans which are easily sold, but are limited from activities requiring on-balance-sheet financing.