Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Douglas C. Dacy. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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. / text

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-215).

Face au vieillissement démographique, l’adéquation de l’offre et de la demande de la prise en charge de la dépendance est au cœur des politiques de santé publique. L’objectif de ce travail est d’estimer la consommation d’hébergement des personnes âgées dépendantes pour un horizon de 5 à 10 ans en intégrant l’origine géographique des résidents. En effet, ces derniers ne cherchent pas nécessairement une réponse d’hébergement à proximité de leur lieu de résidence. On peut ainsi bâtir un « scénario moyen » pour mesurer la consommation d’hébergement actuelle, construire des bassins gérontologiques et envisager des projections d’hébergement les plus précises possibles, selon le postulat « toute chose égale par ailleurs ». Cette recherche menée en Poitou-Charentes en 2010 permet une analyse prospective qui annonce un déficit du nombre de places d’hébergement dès 2017 et qui devrait s’amplifier au cours des années suivantes. Ces résultats trouvent toute leur légitimité pour aider la planification gérontologique et adapter l’offre à la demande à différentes échelles. De plus, ils rendent possible l’appréhension du volume d’emplois non « délocalisables ». / In view of demographic ageing, the adequacy between supply and demand of older population needs is placed in the heart of the public health policy. The aim of this work is to estimate the housing consumption of dependent older people for the time horizon from 5 to 10 years by integrating the geographical origins of residents. In fact, these latter don't necessarily look for an accommodation close to their place of residence. Thus a 'medium scenario' can be proposed to measure the current consumption,build gerontological basins and plan the most accurate possible senior housing projections according to 'all else being equal' principle. This research conducted in Poitou-Charentes in 2010 allows to do a prospective analysis which reveals a deficit in the number of rousing places from 2017 and this deficit is expected to increase over the following years. These results have all legitimacy to help gerontological planning and adapt supply to demand at different scales. Moreover, they make possible the estimation of the volume of 'non relocatable' jobs.

Face au vieillissement démographique, l’adéquation de l’offre et de la demande de la prise en charge de la dépendance est au cœur des politiques de santé publique. L’objectif de ce travail est d’estimer la consommation d’hébergement des personnes âgées dépendantes pour un horizon de 5 à 10 ans en intégrant l’origine géographique des résidents. En effet, ces derniers ne cherchent pas nécessairement une réponse d’hébergement à proximité de leur lieu de résidence. On peut ainsi bâtir un « scénario moyen » pour mesurer la consommation d’hébergement actuelle, construire des bassins gérontologiques et envisager des projections d’hébergement les plus précises possibles, selon le postulat « toute chose égale par ailleurs ». Cette recherche menée en Poitou-Charentes en 2010 permet une analyse prospective qui annonce un déficit du nombre de places d’hébergement dès 2017 et qui devrait s’amplifier au cours des années suivantes. Ces résultats trouvent toute leur légitimité pour aider la planification gérontologique et adapter l’offre à la demande à différentes échelles. De plus, ils rendent possible l’appréhension du volume d’emplois non « délocalisables ». / In view of demographic ageing, the adequacy between supply and demand of older population needs is placed in the heart of the public health policy. The aim of this work is to estimate the housing consumption of dependent older people for the time horizon from 5 to 10 years by integrating the geographical origins of residents. In fact, these latter don't necessarily look for an accommodation close to their place of residence. Thus a 'medium scenario' can be proposed to measure the current consumption,build gerontological basins and plan the most accurate possible senior housing projections according to 'all else being equal' principle. This research conducted in Poitou-Charentes in 2010 allows to do a prospective analysis which reveals a deficit in the number of rousing places from 2017 and this deficit is expected to increase over the following years. These results have all legitimacy to help gerontological planning and adapt supply to demand at different scales. Moreover, they make possible the estimation of the volume of 'non relocatable' jobs.

Evidence from various countries over the past two decades proves that swings in house prices have been concomitant with financial instability. The history of financial crises shows that the six biggest banking crises in advanced economies were accompanied by housing busts. Despite the abundance of literature on the forces behind the financial crisis, and in particular studies investigating the connections between financial stability and disturbances in the real estate market, fundamental questions still wait for convincing answers, such as: (i) To what extent is regional heterogeneity in property price increases reflected in dissimilarity in the evolution of credit default? (ii) What role do borrower-related factors such as housing affordability and household indebtedness, and financial market-related factors such as financial developments, play on the growth of bad loans as a main concern for banking sector? (iii) To which extent do banks’ lending behaviour and property prices undermine the stability of the banking sector, and what are the directions of causality between credit defaults, property prices and banks’ lending behaviour? The goal of this thesis is to investigate these issues and explain the practical implications of the findings. This thesis contains three empirical essays. The first essay explores the nexus between house prices and non-performing loans (NPLs), concentrating on the extent to which geographical variations in house prices are translated into regional variations in credit defaults. The stochastic dominance approach has been used for this purpose, with 372 individual US banks. The stochastic dominance analyses disclose symmetric behaviour between NPLs and the scale of house price increments. The essay is further extended by employing Arellano and Bond’s (1991) GMM model to explore the effect of GDP, unemployment rates, lending interest rates and house prices on the growth of NPLs. The outcomes of the GMM estimations reveal a high explanatory power of economic growth, unemployment and lending interest rates on NPLs. In an additional analysis, a generalised panel threshold model is estimated to check for the presence of a threshold point, above which different impacts of house prices might be found. The threshold model specifications provide a threshold point, in relation to which two different impacts of house prices on the evolution of NPLs are estimated. A general consensus in the literature attributes credit defaults to a wide-ranging spectrum of drivers that take into consideration borrower-related factor, lender-related factors and factors related to financial and real estate markets. The second essay attempts to answer the second question mentioned above, by investigating the impact of borrower-related factors, lender-related factors and financial market-related factors in driving NPLs. The impact of these factors on the evolution of impaired loans is explored by estimating fixed effect models then the analysis is extended to dynamic models using the GMM procedure on an annual balanced panel dataset. Household vulnerability, financial developments and housing affordability are found to be significant contributors to the growth of NPLs. The interaction mechanism between the real estate market and the financial system has often been blamed for being the root of financial crises, through the accumulation of housing market bubbles that leads to the ultimate collapse of the financial markets. The third essay, using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag technique, looks for the presence of cointegrating relationships between mortgage defaults, property prices and bank lending in Hong Kong. Our findings reveal evidence of cointegrating relationships between bank lending, property prices and mortgage defaults in the long term, which governs the correction mechanism between these variables. These outcomes call for more effort to be devoted to maintaining a balanced relationship between these factors. The essay also finds evidence of short-term dynamics between these variables. Importantly, loan-to-value is found to play the most effective role in curbing mortgage default risk in the portfolios of the Hong Kong banking sector.