The paper explores how the standard consumption-CAPM fares in pricing housing returns and regional rental income streams in a cross-section of regions. In particular, we estimate the Euler equations associated with the gross housing returns inclusive of price appreciations and rents jointly for several metropolitan areas of the US. The representative agent has a Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utility. The rent growth is allowed to depend on the business cycle. When biannual data from 1978 to 2007 is used, the parameter estimates are reasonable, and the model is not rejected. Large standard errors indicate uninformative estimates. The implied price rent ratio time series averages are similar to the data; however the model misses the boom-bust pattern in the prices. The model significantly understates the average and the variance of the price appreciations. Results are robust to allowing housing consumption directly in the utility function or using the Epstein–Zin–Weil utility.

Using intraday trades and quotes data, we study the stock options market before, during, and after the market events of May 6, 2010. Focusing on the S&P 500 and S&P 100 stock options, we explore if the options market provided any discernible signals that forewarned the extreme volatility on that day and whether the recovery was fast and without a permanent impact. We find that the options market reacted to the volatility- rather than predicting it, and almost all of the variables are indistinguishable from their previous levels in the next few trading days. Intraday empirical analysis suggests that most of the impact was over within a few hours from the peak of market volatility.