Don't bet the house on a robust revival of the U.S. property market, says the Yale University professor who predicted the bursting of the dot-com and subprime-mortgage bubbles.

There is no "unambiguous" sign of a strong recovery in the market, Robert Shiller and fellow economists Karl Case and Anne Thompson say in a paper published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study seeks to shed light on the role buyer expectations play in house prices, an angle the authors say has been ignored in analyzing the housing slump.

The results of their work, entitled "What Have They Been Thinking? Home Buyer Behavior in Hot and Cold Markets," are based on the responses of almost 5,000 recent homebuyers in four cities to regular mail surveys over the past 25 years.