A fall in house prices due to a change in fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a representative...

An independent currency and a flexible exchange rate generally helps a country in adjusting to macroeconomic shocks. But recently in many countries, interest rates have been pushed down close to the lower bound, limiting the ability of policy-makers to accommodate shocks, even in countries with...

This paper aims to provide a rigorous analysis of Milton Friedman’s famous parable of the ‘helicopter’ drop of money. A helicopter drop of money is a permanent/irreversible increase in the nominal stock of fiat base money with a zero nominal interest rate, which respects the intertemporal...

This paper develops a micro-founded general equilibrium model of the financial system composed of ultimate borrowers, ultimate lenders and financial intermediaries. The model is used to investigate the impact of uncertainty about the likelihood of governmental bailouts on leverage, interest...

Capital formation is a key driver of the growth of potential output. With continuing widespread capital controls and persistently small inward FDI the volume of capital formation in India is constrained by domestic saving. The national saving rate in India (the sum of the saving rates of...

This paper argues that the stock market crash of 2008, triggered by a collapse in house prices, caused the Great Recession. The paper has three parts. First, it provides evidence of a high correlation between the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate in U.S. data since 1929....

Using a variance decomposition of shocks to GDP, we quantify the role of international factor income, international transfers, and saving in achieving risk sharing during the recent European crisis. We focus on the sub-periods 1990--2007, 2008--2009, and 2010 and consider separately the European...

Periods of high indebtedness have historically been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. Sometimes the debt restructuring is more subtle and takes the form of 'financial repression'. Consistent negative real interest rates are equivalent to...

We study liquidity trap dynamics driven by nonfundamental shifts in expectations in a model with nominal rigidities, housing, credit frictions and a Taylor rule. Highly leveraged borrowing through nominal debt backed by real estate collateral greatly magnifies the decline in output and house...

This paper is about the size of fiscal multipliers and the sources of recovery from the Great Depression. Its contributions begin with a new quarterly data set for the interwar period that allows development of a VAR model of the U. S. economy over the period 1920-41. The quarterly data...