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,...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...

We incorporate financial linkages in EAGLE, a New Keynesian multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model of the euro area (EA) by including financial frictions and country-specific banking sectors. In this new version, termed EAGLE-FLI (Euro Area and Global Economy with Financial Linkages),...

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...

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....

In this paper we show that long-run expectations about future housing prices of both households and, especially, financial intermediaries had a large impact on households' indebtedness during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We introduce the theory of natural expectations in a...

When do financial markets help in predicting economic activity? With incomplete markets, the link between financial and real economy is state-dependent and financial indicators may turn out to be useful particularly in forecasting "tail" macroeconomic events. We examine this conjecture by...

The recent debate about the falling share of labor income has brought attention to the trends in income shares, but less attention has been devoted to their variability. In this paper, we analyze how their fluctuations can be insured against between workers and capitalists, and the corresponding...

We use monthly data on individual loans from the Italian Credit Register over the period from 1997 to 2019 and show that bank credit expansions in the non-financial private sector are mostly explained by variations in the extensive margin calculated either in credit flows or headcount of new...