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The surging cost of living and shortage of affordable and sustainable homes fuel the global housing crisis. Earthship buildings are marketed as the epitome of affordable and sustainable alternative housing. This paper aimed to elicit the perception of Earthship buildings among youngsters in the United Kingdom using immersive virtual reality technology. Additionally, the impact of virtual reality on perception compared with two-dimensional drawings was investigated in the study.

A three-phase, experiment-based survey was adopted: Phase 1: literature review, Earthship house model conception and the virtual environment creation; Phase 2: two-dimensional drawing-based pre-visualisation survey; Phase 3: virtual reality–based post-visualisation survey.

The findings indicated that youngsters had a remarkable, positive change in attitude towards the uptake of the Earthship houses after virtual reality visualisation. In contrast, sustainability experts shared more concerns regarding the concept's viability in the United Kingdom, even after the virtual reality visualisation. However, both youngsters and experts agreed with the pre-eminence of virtual reality over two-dimensional drawings.

The lack of awareness about Earthship buildings for posterity was noted in previous studies, which could be attributed to there being very few Earthship buildings in the United Kingdom. The importance of this awareness among youngsters cannot be over-emphasised since youngsters are affected most by the shortage of affordable and sustainable homes. This gap was addressed by enlightening the youth about Earthship houses and imparting awareness through near-real-life virtual reality visualisation.

Throughout the 21st century, US households have experienced unprecedented levels of leverage. This dynamic has been exacerbated by income shortfalls during the COVID-19 crisis. Leveraging and deleveraging decisions affect household consumption. This study investigates the effect of the dynamics of household leverage and consumption on the stock market.

The authors explore the relation between household leverage and consumption in the context of the consumption capital asset pricing model (CCAPM). The authors test the model's implication that leverage has a negative risk premium by transforming the asset pricing restriction into an unconditional linear factor model and estimate the model using the general method of moments procedure. The authors run time-series regressions to estimate individual stocks' exposures to leverage, and cross-sectional regressions to investigate the leverage risk premium.

The authors show that shocks to household debt have strong and lasting effects on consumption growth. The authors extend the CCAPM to accommodate this effect and find, using various test assets, a negative risk premium associated with household deleveraging. Looking at individual stocks the authors show that the deleveraging risk premium is not explained by well-known risk factors.

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of leverage in economics and finance by establishing a relation between household leverage and spending decisions. The authors provide novel evidence that households' leveraging and deleveraging decisions can be a fundamental and influential force in determining asset prices. Further, this paper argues that household leverage might explain the small, persistent, and predictable component in consumption growth hypothesised in the long-run risk asset pricing literature.