Housing and mortgage debt are studied in a quantitative general equilibrium model. The model matches wealth distribution, age profiles of homeownership and debt, and frequency of housing adjustment. Over the cycle, the model matches the cyclicality and volatility of housing investment, and the...

There exist substantial differences in the generosity of bankruptcy protection across U.S. states. This paper exploits cross-state variation in exemption levels to assess the dual role of durable goods as informal collateral for unsecured debt and self-insurance against bad shocks to earnings....

The toolkit adapts a first-order perturbation approach and applies it in a piecewise fashion to solve dynamic models with occasionally binding constraints. Our examples include a real business cycle model with a constraint on the level of investment and a New Keynesian model subject to the zero...