In this paper our main aim is to quantify the role that housing collateral plays for the monetary transmission mechanism. Furthermore, we want to explore the implications of the increase in household indebtedness, and specifically the loan-to-value ratio, in the last two decades. We set up a two...

Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...

I show that individuals whose unemployment risk tends to increase more when local home prices fall optimally invest less in owner-occupied housing. Using a unique, Swedish register-based database, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the covariance between individually estimated...

Cross-country differences in homeownership rates are large and persistent over time, with homeownership rates ranging from 44% in Switzerland to 83% in Spain. This paper investigates whether cultures-defined as behavioral attitudes passed across generations-may value homeownership differently,...

We exploit a quasi-experiment that occurred in Stockholm in 2007 to provide new evidence on the magnitude of the housing wealth e.ect. Stockholm's smaller city airport was expected to close in 2011 but its operating contract was unexpectedly renewed after political negotiation behind closed...

Using a monthly panel dataset of individuals' debt composition including mortgage and nonmortgage consumer credit, we show that house price changes can explain a significant fraction of personal debt composition dynamics. We exploit the variation in local house price growth as shocks to...