This paper examines access to business finance by Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and to housing finance by Canadian households (particularly non-prime borrowers) against the background of a fairly concentrated and protected banking industry. It finds access broadly adequate...

Korean household debt has reached 148 percent of disposable income, high by emerging market standards. Most of this debt remains at variable rates, shifting the interest rate risk from better diversified financial institutions to households and increasing their sensitivity to macroeconomic...

This paper estimates the evolution of equilibrium real home prices in the United States and finds that despite recent declines, single-family homes remained 8 to 20 percent overvalued as of the first quarter of 2008. In the short run, the gap between actual and equilibrium prices does not exert...

After a number of warning signs, the U.S. "subprime mortgage crisis" became a headline issue in February 2007. Notwithstanding the bankruptcy of numerous mortgage companies, historically high delinquencies and foreclosures, and a significant tightening in subprime lending standards, the impact...

This paper argues that making affordable home mortgage loans available to a large cross section of the population will serve both the redistributive and growth-enhancing objectives of poverty reduction policies. The current state of housing and mortgage markets in selected Middle East and North...

House prices in Europe have shown diverging trends, and this paper seeks to explain these differences by analyzing three groups of countries: the "fast lane", the average performers, and the slow movers. Price movements in the first two groups are found to be driven mostly by income and trends...

Klyuev (2008) concluded that the Canadian market for housing finance is highly advanced and sophisticated, but financing options were somewhat limited, particularly at terms longer than five years. This paper argues that the paucity of longer-term loans is caused by a five-year maturity cap on...

This Selected Issues paper examines the factors determining housing prices in the United Kingdom. Based on econometric evidence, the paper assesses whether recent housing price increases can be explained by fundamentals or whether they represent a temporary overshooting of housing prices,...

Jappelli and Pagano (1994) argues that tightening the borrowing constraints in the mortgage markets promotes savings. Employing a six-period overlapping generations model with endogenous growth and a method of simulation calibrated on the Middle East, this paper demonstrates that the above...

This paper incorporates house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. The model is calibrated to match U.S. data and accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle profile of home ownership, and the...