It is hypothesized that constant payment mortgages (imposed, in part, by regulation) lead to distortions in the housing market in the face of anticipated inflation. The nature of this distortion is specified within a model of the housing market. Evidence is presented supporting the existence of the distortion. Moreover, this evidence is found to be robust to various structural and reduced form specifications of the model. A concluding section uses simulation to estimate the total loss to the housing stock up to 1974 attributable to the distortion. It is also shown that the production mix is affected by the inflation-induced distortion.

It is hypothesized that constant payment mortgages (imposed, in part, by regulation) lead to distortions in the housing market in the face of anticipated inflation. The nature of this distortion is specified within a model of the housing market. Evidence is presented supporting the existence of the distortion. Moreover, this evidence is found to be robust to various structural and reduced form specifications of the model. A concluding section uses simulation to estimate the total loss to the housing stock up to 1974 attributable to the distortion. It is also shown that the production mix is affected by the inflation-induced distortion.

"This paper uses combinations of full brothers, half brothers, and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a household's income and wealth. While the data are drawn from a nineteenth-century [U.S.] population, the intraclass correlation for income ranges from .13 to .18, which is similar to that found in modern samples. Intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher (.18-.35) than are those for income. Intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect. When unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects, the individual effect dominates the family effect for income, while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth." A comment by Sherwin Rosen is included (pp. 80-2).

In a 1976 survey, Kearl et al. (1979; hereafter, 1976 survey) concluded that the then widespread perception that there was little agreement among professional economists on matters of theory or policy was simply wrong. However, the most casual empiricism, namely the continuing popularity of jokes about disagreements among economists, suggests the perception of noneconomists has not changed much since the 1970's. What is the present state of consensus among economists? This question is of interest because more than a decade has elapsed since the 1976 survey and during this time many issues confronting economists and the composition of the profession have changed.1 Benjamin M. Friedman and Lawrence H. Summers (1991 p. ix), for example, have asserted that ...economic thinking in many subfields of the discipline now differs markedly from what it was in 1970.... Consensus among European economists has been examined by Bruno S. Frey et al. (1984). Martin Ricketts and Edward Shoesmith (1990, 1992) focus exclusively on British economic opinion. This paper provides the first general analysis of opinions of U.S. economists in more than a decade. I. The Survey and Questionnaire