In this paper our main aim is to quantify the role that housing collateral plays for the monetary transmission mechanism. Furthermore, we want to explore the implications of the increase in household indebtedness, and specifically the loan-to-value ratio, in the last two decades. We set up a two...

The substantial fluctuations in house prices recently experienced by many industrialized economies have stimulated a vivid debate on the possible implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we ask whether the U.S. Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have reacted to house prices....

It has been suggested that interest-rate smoothing may be partly explained by an omitted variable that relates to conditions in financial markets. We propose an alternative interpretation that suggests that it relates to measurement errors in the output gap.

"Leaning against the wind" – a tighter monetary policy than necessary for stabilizing inflation around the inflation target and unemployment around a long-run sustainable rate – has been justified as a way of reducing household indebtedness. In a recent paper Lars Svensson claims that this...

In this paper, I use high-frequency financial market estimates to identify the monetary policy shock in a non-recursive 133 variable FAVAR. All restrictions are imposed exclusively on impact, and only on financial market variables. Using the economy's underlying factor structure as the link...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...

We analyze financial risk premiums and real economic dynamics in a DSGE model with three types of agents - shareholders, bondholders and workers - that differ in participation in the capital market and in attitude towards risk and intertemporal substitution. Aggregate productivity and...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity. In a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts, firms have to post collateral to obtain external finance. In a real one-sector model with this type of "collateral constraint", positive news about future...

We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket partic- ipation, has roughly doubled stockholders’share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

This paper tests the balance sheet theory, where the status of balance sheets affects the economy´s response to monetary and other shocks. The theory predicts a positive effect of cash flow on investment, given fundamental determinants of investment. I use an empirical method developed by...