Between 1996 and 2006, real housing prices rose by 53 percent according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency price index. One explanation of this boom is that it was caused by easy credit in the form of low real interest rates, high loan-to-value levels and permissive mortgage approvals. We...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

This paper presents an identification strategy that allows us to study both the sectoral effects of monetary policy and the role that monetary policy plays in the transmission of sectoral shocks. We apply our methodology to the case of the U.S. and find some significant differences in the...

In a fixed-cost model of durable consumption demand, we show that an important channel of monetary policy transmission is to prompt households to accelerate the timing of their adjustments. We highlight three ways in which the power of monetary policy is reduced relative to the standard New...

The housing market is of central concern to monetary policy makers. To achieve the dual goals of price stability and maximum sustainable employment, monetary policy makers must understand the role that housing plays in the monetary transmission mechanism if they are to set policy instruments...

This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is...

We investigate the bank lending channel of negative nominal policy rates from an empirical and theoretical perspective. We find that retail household deposit rates are subject to a lower bound (DLB). Empirically, once the DLB is met, the pass-through to lending rates and credit volumes is...

How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates depends not just on their current level but also on...

We propose a model of banks' exposure to movements in interest rates and their role in the transmission of monetary shocks. Since bank deposits provide liquidity, higher interest rates allow banks to earn larger spreads on deposits. Therefore, if risk aversion is higher than one, banks' optimal...

We revisit the transmission mechanism of monetary policy for household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of household wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two key features: multiple assets with...