The paper investigates whether firms have better access to bank credit in areas with a larger degree of urbanization. It uses bank-firm data drawn from the Credit Register maintained at the Bank of Italy to devise an indicator of ease of access to credit. The paper proposes an instrumental...

We examine the impact of household mortgages on house prices. Using biannual data on Italian cities for the years 2003-2015, we build an exogenous and fully data-driven indicator of mortgage supply stances and use it as an instrument for actual extended mortgages. Our results indicate that...

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the U.S. and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices,...

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics of house price dynamics for a sample of 16 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, over the period 1995-2011. Linking housing valuations to a set of conventional fundamental determinants – relative to both the supply and the...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

In this paper, we extend and calibrate with Italian data the Agent-based model of the real estate sector described in Baptista et al., 2016. We design a novel calibration methodology that is built on a multivariate moment-based measure and a set of three search algorithms: a low discrepancy...

This paper studies the impact of foreclosures on house prices in Italy using a large dataset of listings. We estimate that the foreclosure discount is considerable, and this would suggest a high degree of market segmentation and limited spillovers from foreclosures to the market for...

We provide quasi-experimental evidence of the effects of a relaxation of land use constraints on local economic activity. We exploit the fact that in 1999 the central government imposed fiscal rules on municipal governments and in 2001 it relaxed them for municipalities with less than 5,000...

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth – proxied by house and stock market prices – on private consumption for a panel of sixteen emerging economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Using recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous panels, i.e....