This paper examines the origins and early performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort. The Fed was established to overcome the problems of the National Banking era, in particular an “inelastic” currency and the absence of an effective lender of last resort. As conceived by...

This paper attempts to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market. We apply the procedure of Rigobon and Sack (2003) to identify and estimate a VAR in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This procedure fully takes into account the endogeneity of interest rates and stock returns...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

This paper investigates the responses of house prices and household credit to monetary policy shocks in Norway, using Bayesian structural VAR models. I find that the effect of a monetary policy shock on house prices is large, while the effect on household credit is muted. This is consistent with...

Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

We investigate the behavior of the equilibrium price-rent ratio for housing in a simple Lucas-type asset pricing model. We allow for time-varying risk aversion (via external habit formation) and time-varying persistence and volatility in the stochastic process for rent growth, consistent with...

We study the interaction between monetary policy and household debt dynamics. To this end, we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where household debt is amortized gradually, and only new loans are constrained by the current value of collateral. Long-term debt implies that...

With regard to the recent US house price cycle, we analyze how the interaction between housing supply restrictions, mortgage credit constraints and a price-to-price feedback loop affects house price volatility. Considering 247 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, we estimate a simultaneous boom-bust...

I denne rapporten analyserer vi avkastningsmønsteret på Oslo Børs over perioden 1980 - 2006. Formålet med rapporten er å analysere drivkreftene bak kursutviklingen i det norske aksjemarkedet. Et viktig siktemål med analysen er dessuten å undersøke i hvilken grad hovedresultatene fra...