We study the effects of government intervention in the housing market on prices, quantities and welfare in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents. We consider (i) the introduction of temporary home purchase tax credits and (ii) a removal of the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and rental housing. Home buyer tax credits temporarily raise house prices and transaction volumes, but have negative welfare effects. Removing the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and rental housing would generate welfare gains for a majority of agents in a comparison of stationary equilibria. Welfare impacts are more varied, though still positive, along the transition between steady states.

We use the appointment of a Kenyan Roman Catholic archbishop as a natural experiment to analyze the impact of church authorities' teaching on sexual behavior. Using a triple-difference approach, we find that following the archbishop's counter-doctrinal assertion that condom use within a marriage can be acceptable to reduce HIV infections, Catholic married couples within the archdiocese who had access to condoms were 7.0 percentage points more likely to use condoms than unmarried Catholics in the diocese, non-Catholics within the diocese, or Catholics in other dioceses. These results are quantitatively large and robust to a number of econometric specifications. The evidence for whether advocating condom use leads to an increase in infidelity or a decrease in respect for women is not conclusive. Our results suggest an important role for the Catholic church in the fight against HIV. This is especially relevant in light of Pope Benedict XVI's recent reconciliatory statement about condom use.

The recent episode of rising consumer bankruptcies and increasing foreclosure rates has sparked a lively debate about how to best tackle the crisis in the U.S. housing market. We contribute to this debate by providing an explicit model of a household’s joint decision to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy and to enter into foreclosure. This model demonstrates how bankruptcy exemption limits and mortgage regulation interact to influence consumer bankruptcy and foreclosure rates. We use state-level data to show that our model predictions are empirically plausible. We suggest that policy proposals need to focus on reducing both foreclosures and bankruptcies jointly. In particular, we argue that in the short-run a switch from non-recourse mortgages to recourse mortgages may have little effect on the number of foreclosures, but could dramatically increase the number of bankruptcies.