There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...

In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability.  Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers.  However, much depends on the...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

The paper analyses household money demand and consumption. Variables that measure shortage and expectations about its future course are introduced to capture the effects of the transition from centrally planned to market economy. The Johansen procedure is used to identify a system of the two...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...

Consumer leverage can generate financial crises characterized by increased bankruptcy, tightened credit access and reduced demand for goods.  This paper embeds financial frictions in the mortgage contracts of homeowners within a two-sector economy to show that even at moderate initial levels,...

Financial liberalisation and innovation (FLIB) in Australia over the 1980s and 1990s provided the institutional backdrop for one of the most rapid increases in household balance sheets and house prices in the world.  An equilibrium correction model of quarterly Australian house prices for...

Empirical analyses of Cagan`s money demand schedule have broadly speaking suffered from the following problems: (i) Inability to model the data to the end of the hyperinflation. (ii) Difficulties in making congruent models for systems of variables. (iii) Discrepancies between estimated and...

In models with a representative infinitely lived household, modern versions of tax smoothing imply that the steady-state of government debt should follow a random walk.  This is unlikely to be the case in OLG economies, where the equilibrium interest rate may differ from the policy-maker's rate...

 This paper assesses the quantitative impact of ambiguity on the historically observed financial asset returns and prices. The single agent, in a dynamic exchange economy, treats the conditional uncertainty about the consumption and dividends next period as ambiguous. We calibrate the agent's...