We use the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel data set to empirically examine how past house price growth influences the timing of homeownership. We find that the median individual in metropolitan areas with the highest quartile house price growth becomes a homeowner 5 years earlier than that in areas with the lowest quartile house price growth. The result is consistent with a life cycle housing-demand model in which high past price growth increases expectations of future price growth thus accelerating home purchases at young ages. We show that extrapolative expectations formed by homebuyers are a necessary channel to explain the result.

This article studies the condominium loan market, which experienced a 15-fold increase in origination and constituted 15% of the overall residential loan originations from 2001 to 2007. Condominium loan defaults grow at a faster rate than single-family (including subprime) loan defaults. Further analysis suggests that the greater default level and growth rate in later loan cohorts are consistent with the investor channel explanation: investor borrowers default more, especially when house prices start to decline. We also show that condo defaults have triggered more defaults of the same cohort subprime mortgages at the same location.

We study the participation of women in golf, a predominately male social activity, and its influence on their likelihood of serving on a board of directors. Exploiting a novel dataset of all golfers in Singapore, we find that woman golfers enjoy a 54% higher likelihood of serving on a board relative to male golfers. A woman's probability of serving on the board in a large firm or in a predominately male industry increases by 117% to 125% when she plays golf. Joining the boy's informal network appears to facilitate women's entrance or success in the executive labor market.