We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

The Basel credit-to-GDP gap is the single most popular measure of excessive credit growth and the financial cycle in general. It is based, however, on a purely statistical understanding of excessiveness: Growth is excessive if the credit-to-GDP ratio (i.e. the ratio of credit to nominal GDP) is...

Current time allocation and household production models face three major weaknesses: First, they only describe the average time allocation. Thus, information about the order of activities is lost. Therefore, it is impossible to describe the influence of activities on later ones. Such...

How do labor market reforms affect international competitiveness and net foreign assets? To answer this question, we build a two-region RBC model with labor market frictions, idiosyncratic consumption risk, and limited cross-sectional heterogeneity to establish a direct link between labor market...

We estimate the "unhedged interest rate exposure" (URE) of euro area households. The URE is a welfare metric that captures the extent to which households are exposed to changes in real interest rates, and reflects the direct gains and losses in interest income flows incurred by households after...

House-purchasing decisions and the possibility of existing homeowners to tap into their housing equity depend decisively on prevailing loan-to-value (LTV) ratios in mortgage markets with borrowing constrained households. Utilizing a smooth transition local projection (STLP) approach, I show that...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

Motivated by the apparent failure of the credit multiplier mechanism (CM) to deliver amplification in DSGE models, we re-examine its role in business cycles to address the question: is something wrong with the CM? Our answer is no. In coming to this answer we construct a model with reproducible...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...