We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

Social welfare programs in the United States are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of Cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the U.S., we examine the variation in...

Supervisory and monitoring costs are explored to understand aspects of occupational segregation by sex. Around the turn of this century 47 percent of all female manufacturing operatives were paid by the piece, but only 13 percent of the males were. There were very few males and females employed...

Speculation is a critical channel through which credit supply expansion affects the housing cycle. The surge in private label mortgage securitization in 2003 fueled a large expansion in mortgage credit supply by lenders financed with non-core deposits. Areas more exposed to these lenders...

We analytically characterize optimal monetary policy for a New Keynesian model with a housing sector. If one supposes that the private sector has rational expectations about future housing prices and inflation, optimal monetary policy can be characterized without making reference to housing...

Chinese housing prices rose by over 10 percent per year in real terms between 2003 and 2014, and are now between two and ten times higher than the construction cost of apartments. At the same time, Chinese developers built 100 billion square feet of residential real estate. This boom has been...