We present new evidence that lenders use down payment size to price unobservable borrower risk. We exploit the contractual features of a UK scheme that helps home buyers top up their down payments with equity loans. We find that a 20 percentage point smaller down payment is associated with a 22...

The homes of those in charge of firms are an important source of finance for ongoing businesses. We use firm level accounting data, transaction level house price data and loan level residential mortgage data from the United Kingdom to show that a £1 increase in the value of the residential real...

Most London housing transactions involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this to estimate the time value of housing — the relationship between the price of a property and the term of ownership — over a hundred years and derive implied discount rates. For our empirical...

This paper uses detailed firm-level data to show that monetary policy affects employment through housing collateral and corporate debt. Our research design exploits the fact that many small and medium-sized enterprises use their directors' homes as a key source of collateral for corporate loans,...

The credit risk that an individual bank poses to the rest of the financial system depends on its size, the type of exposures it has to the real economy, and its obligations to other institutions. This paper describes a system-wide risk management approach to calibrating individual banks' capital...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...

An individual bank can put the whole banking system at risk if its losses in response to shocks push losses for the system as a whole above a critical threshold. We determine the contribution of banks to this systemic risk using a generalisation of the Shapley value; a concept originating in...

This paper examines the role of macroprudential capital requirements in preventing inefficient credit booms in a model with reputational externalities. Unprofitable banks have strong incentives to invest in risky assets and generate inefficient credit booms when macroeconomic fundamentals are...

The global financial crisis has precipitated an increasing appreciation of the need for a systemic perspective towards financial stability. For example: What role do large banks play in systemic risk? How should capital adequacy standards recognize this role? How is stability shaped by...

We examine the role of macroeconomic fluctuations, asset market liquidity, and network structure in determining contagion and aggregate losses in a stylised financial system. Systemic instability is explored in a financial network comprising three distinct, but interconnected, sets of agents -...