We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail prices to changes in local house prices, with elasticities of 15%-20% across housing booms and busts. Notably, these price responses are largest in zip codes with many homeowners, and non-existent in zip codes with mostly...

A fall in house prices due to a change in fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a representative...

Housing is a major component of wealth. Since house prices fluctuate considerably over time, it is important to understand how these fluctuations affect households' consumption decisions. Rising house prices may stimulate consumption by increasing households' perceived wealth, or by relaxing...

We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house prices. Our main findings are that: 1) Large housing wealth effects are not new: we estimate...

The housing sector is now (September 2007) at the root of three distinct but related problems: (1) a sharp decline in house prices and the related fall in home building; (2) a subprime mortgage problem that has triggered a substantial widening of all credit spreads and the freezing of much of...

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibriummodel of the housing market where a large number of overlapping generations of homeowners face both idiosyncratic and aggregate risks but have limited opportunities to insure against these risks due to incomplete financial markets and...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...

This paper addresses how creditor protection affects the volatility of stock market prices. Credit protection reduces the probability of oscillations between binding and non-binding states of the credit constraint; thereby lowering the rate of return variance. We test this prediction of a...

This paper examines the relationship between child labor and access to credit at a cross-country level. Even though this link is theoretically central to child labor, so far there has been little work done to assess its importance empirically. We measure child labor as a country aggregate, and...