This chapter considers the structure of mortgage finance in the U.S., and its role in shaping patterns of homeownership, the nature of the housing stock, and the organization of residential activity. We start by providing some background on the design features of mortgage contracts that...

The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors...

Young Americans’ residence choices have changed markedly over the past fifteen years, with recent cohorts entering the housing market at lower rates, and lingering much longer in parents’ households. This paper begins with descriptive evidence on the residence choices of 1 percent of young...

The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption...

Foreign bank entrants into emerging markets are usually thought to improve the condition and performance of acquired institutions, and more generally to enhance local financial stability. We use bank-specific data for a range of Latin American countries since the mid-1990s to address elements of...

We create a novel measure of job search effort starting in 1994 by exploiting the overlap between the Current Population Survey and the American Time Use Survey. We examine the cyclical behavior of aggregate job search effort using time series and cross-state variation and find that it is...