This paper describes the wealth accumulation of American youth and relates this behavior to their eventual housing choices. We develop a data set that links wealth profiles of youth with constant- quality house prices and tenure choice. A panel data set is compiled for youth age 20-33 for the years 1985 through 1990. We construct wealth profiles for each household over the six year period and indicate how wealth varies with labor supply, marriage, fertility, gender, education, race/ethnicity, and tenure choice. We find renters' wealth accumulates rapidly in the year before and year of first homeownership. The factors related to this increase are marriage, increased labor supply by married women, and gifts/inheritances. Of particular interest is the finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between the local real price of housing and middle and upper income renters' wealth and married female labor supply. Also, youth in high housing cost localities tend to live in groups at a greater rate compared to those in low cost areas.

Three major changes occurred during the 1980s in the market for home mortgage credit; the securitization of fixed-rate mortgages, the development of a national primary market for adjustable-rate mortgages, and the decimation of the saving and loan industry. These changes and their impacts on various financial industries and homebuyers are the subjects of this paper. I also briefly speculate about likely future changes in this market.

We have constructed a simple two-sector model of the demand for housing and corporate capital. An increase in the inflation rate, with and with- out an increase in the risk premium on equities, was then simulated with a number of model variants. The model and simulation experiments illustrate both the tax bias in favor of housing (its initial average real user cost was 3 percentage points less than that for corporate capital) and the manner in which inflation magnifies it (the difference rises to 5 percentage points without an exogenous increase in real house prices and 4 percentage points with an exogenous increase). The existence of a capital-market constraint offsets the increase in the bias against corporate capital, but it introduces a sharp, inefficient reallocation of housing from less wealthy, constrained households to wealthy households who do not have gains on mortgages and are not financially const rained. Widespread usage of innovative housing finance instruments would overcome this reallocation but at the expense of corporate capital. Only a reduction in inflation or in the taxation of income from business capital will solve the problem of inefficient allocation of capital. The simulation results are also able to provide an explanation for the failure of nominal interest rates to rise by a multiple of an increase in the inflation rate in a world with taxes. When the inflation rate alone was increased, the ratio of the increases in the risk-free and inflation rates was 1.32. An increase in the risk premium on equities, in conjunction with the increase in inflation, lowered the simulated ratio to 1.10, introduction of a supply price elasticity of 4 and an exogenous increase in the real house price reduced the ratio to 1.03, and incorporation of the credit-market. constraint reduced the ratio to 0.95.

Between 1960 and 1980, the number of households in the U.S. increased by 50 percent and the proportion of the population that were household heads rose from 29.5 to 36.3. While some of this increase was due to the maturing of the"baby boom" population, over half was caused by rising age-specific headship rates. In contrast, between 1980 and 1983, headship rates fell sharply for the under 34 population. This paper explains household formations due to changes in headship rates in terms of changes in real income and the price of privacy

This paper contains three parts: a discussion of the tax advantages of household capital (owner-occupied housing and consumer durables) relative to business capital (structures and producers durables) ,an analysis of alternative mechanisms for reducing these advantages (including the use of the mechanisms since 1965) ,and a brief enumeration of various attempts to lower the residential mortgage rate relative to other debt yields that have been employed during the past two decades or are currently being advocated.

Portfolio-based general equilibrium models are useful for analyzing the interaction between the structure of individual tax rates and the way.

The study is divided into four broad parts, beginning with an exploratory analysis of the data on expost returns on corporate equities and bonds for the 1926-80 period. In Part 2, we estimate the relationships between one-month expost returns on corporate bonds and equities andvariations in Treasury bill rates, economic activity, and other variables.The major other variable is unanticipated changes in new issue coupon rates on long-term Treasury bonds. Parts 3 and 4 contain econometric investigations of the determinants of one-month Treasury bill rates and unanticipated changes in long-term Treasury coupon rates, respectively. These parts extend the analysis of Part 2 by explaining variables that determine expost corporate bond and equity returns and provide evidence on the determination of new-issue yields on short- and long-term default-free debt. The last three parts ofthe study report econometric results based on data from the 1953-83 period.A number of important issues are addressed in the econometric parts of the paper. These include: the validity of the Modigliani-Cohn valuation-error hypothesis, the measurement of Merton's "excess return on the market", the relationship between real new-issue debt rates and real economic activity, and the usefulness of the Livingston survey data in explaining financial returns.