Steven D. Gjerstad and Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith demonstrate the critical role that household and bank balance sheets play in economic cycles.

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.

Why are house prices in many advanced economies rising faster than incomes? Why isn’t land and location taught or seen as important in modern economics? What is the relationship between the financial system and land? In this accessible but provocative guide to the economics of land and housing, the authors reveal how many of the key challenges facing modern economies - including housing crises, financial instability and growing inequalities - are intimately tied to the land economy. Looking at the ways in which discussions of land have been routinely excluded from both housing policy and economic theory, the authors show that in order to tackle these increasingly pressing issues a major rethink by both politicians and economists is required.

A detailed analysis of the psychological and mechanical causes of the biggest rally, and subsequent fall, of housing prices ever recorded. Examines the causes of the breathtaking rise in prices and the catastrophic fall that ensued to answer the question on every homeowner's mind: "Why did house prices fall?"--Page 4 of cover

In recent years, almost daily media attention has been focused on the plight of the homeless in cities across the United States. Drawing upon experiences in the U.S. and Europe, John Gilderbloom and Richard Appelbaum challenge conventional assumptions concerning the operation of housing markets and provide policy alternatives directed at the needs of low- and moderate-income families. Rethinking Rental Housing is a ground-breaking analysis that shows the value of applying a broad sociological approach to urban problems, one that takes into account the basic economic, social, and political dimensions of the urban housing crisis. Gilderbloom and Appelbaum predict that this crisis will worsen in the 1990s and argue that a "supply and demand" approach will not work in this case because housing markets are not competitive. They propose that the most effective approach to affordable housing is to provide non-market alternatives fashioned after European housing programs, particularly the Swedish model. An important feature of this book is the discussion of tenant movements that have tried to implement community values in opposition to values of development and landlord capital. One of the very few publications on rental housing, it is unique in applying a sociological framework to the study of this topic.

This housing bubble book doesn't talk about what happened to people during the Housing Bubble. It explains what a housing bubble is, why they occur, what ended them, that they can't be prevented or controlled by regulation, and how to prevent them in the future. It shows that housing bubbles are always a bad thing for the economy, and why. The book can do all of that when other books and TV programs about the bubble couldn't, because it is based upon the realization that a Homemania occurred in which houses were not bought because they provided shelter and comfort but because they were appreciating in price very rapidly. This caused a cessation of mortgage defaults. This lead to the creation of an investment that paid a very high return with zero apparent risk. The investment produced no wealth, but greatly increased comsumption, thereby impoverishing the economy. Explains mortgage backed securities including CDOs, CDSs, and Synthetic CDOs. Shows who was and wasn't culpable.