There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. This paper exploits liquid …, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of consumption and household debt to income in South Africa, from 1971 to 2005. The … variable with key interactions with drivers of consumption and debt. Credit conditions are proxied by a spline function …

flexibility/development of mortgage markets; (3) the transmission of monetary policy shocks on consumption and house prices is … mortgage structure (variable vs. fixed interest rate). In line with our empirical evidence, the sensitivity of consumption to …We study the role of institutional characteristics of mortgage markets in affecting the strength and timing of the …

Sponsored Enterprises (such as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac) in the mortgage market. In order to do so we construct a model with … heterogeneous, infinitely lived households and competitive housing and mortgage markets. Households have the option to default on … provided and tax-financed mortgage interest rate subsidy. We find that eliminating this subsidy leads to substantially lower …

policy shocks on aggregate consumption and for the impact on inflation that other models have hard a time explaining. In …

Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level impulse responses as well as multipliers for government spending … tend to decrease consumption inequality, whereas tax policy shocks most negatively affect the lives of the poor, more so … than the rich, thus increasing consumption inequality. …

The consumption Euler equation is a building block of modern macro theory. Yet, the existing evidence on aggregate data … state of the economy. The nonlinear method reveals that during periods in which consumption is above its conditional average … value) than the estimates associated with periods of below-average consumption. Our evidence is consistent with models of …