This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to externalfinance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household ExternalFinance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

[...]The most obvious possible, and undesirable,impact on bank behaviour of risk-weighted capital requirementsis that excessive differentials in the weights appliedto different categories of assets might induce banks to substituteaway from highly risk-weighted assets. In the early1990s, U.S....