The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors...

The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was the result of an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices,...

Although small firms are most sensitive to interest rate and other shocks, empirical work on corporate risk management has focused instead on large public companies. This paper studies fixed-rate and adjustable-rate loans to see how small firms manage their exposure to interest rate risk. The...

While the world real interest rate is potentially an important mechanism for transmitting international shocks to small open economies, much of the recent quantitative research that studies this mechanism concludes that it has little effect on output, investment, and net exports. We reexamine...

This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially...

We use a large matched sample of individual loans, borrowers, and banks to investigate whether bank financial health affects terms of lending, holding constant proxies for borrower risk and information costs. In particular, we focus on measuring effects of borrower and bank characteristics on...

The optimal prepayment model asserts that rational homeowners would refinance if they can reduce the current value of their liabilities by an amount greater than the refinancing threshold, defined as the cost of carrying the transaction plus the time value of the embedded call option. To compute...

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the...

The paper considers the macroeconomic transmission of demand and supply shocks in an open economy under alternative assumptions about whether the zero interest rate floor (ZIF) is binding. It uses a two-country general-equilibrium simulation model calibrated to the Japanese economy relative to...

We explore the connection between optimal monetary policy and heterogeneity among agents. We utilize a standard monetary economy with two types of agents that differ in the marginal utility they derive from real money balances-a framework that produces a nondegenerate stationary distribution of...