This paper examines the contributions of population aging, mortgage innovation and historically low interest rates to the sharp rise in U.S. house prices and mortgage debt between 1994 and 2005. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium housing model and find that these three...

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to...

Using the Baker et al. (2013) index of policy uncertainty for six developed countries, this paper estimates spillovers of policy uncertainty. We find that spillovers account for slightly more than one-fourth of the dynamics of policy uncertainty in these countries, with this share rising to...

We study a model with repeated moral hazard where financial contracts are not fully indexed to inflation because nominal prices are observed with delay as in Jovanovic & Ueda (1997). More constrained firms sign contracts that are less indexed to the nominal price and, as a result, their...

This paper examines the relationship between aggregate consumer spending and credit availability in the United States. The author finds that consumer spending falls (rises) in response to a reduction (increase) in credit availability. Moreover, she provides a formal assessment of the possibility...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

The authors use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model, a multi-country, multi-sector dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking system (the BoC-GEM-FIN), to study the evolution of global current account balances following the recent global financial...

This paper examines the relationship between aggregate consumer spending and credit availability in the United States. The author finds that consumer spending falls (rises) in response to a reduction (increase) in credit availability. Moreover, she provides a formal assessment of the possibility...

Using an error-correction model (ECM) framework, the authors attempt to quantify the degree of disequilibrium in Canadian housing stock over the period 1961–2008 for the national aggregate and over 1981–2008 for the provinces. They find that, based on quarterly data, the level of housing...

Since the work of Doepke and Schneider (2006a) and Meh and Terajima (2008), we know that inflation causes major redistribution of wealth - between households and the government, between nationals and foreigners, and between households within the same country. Two types of monetary policy,...