How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...

What are the effects of different borrower-based macroprudential tools when both real and nominal interest rates are low? We study this question in a New Keynesian model featuring long-term debt, housing transaction costs and a zero lower bound constraint on policy rates. We find that the...

We study what happens to identified shocks and to dynamic responses when the data generating process features q disturbances but less than q variables are used in the empirical model. Identified shocks are mongrels: they are linear combinations of current and past values of all structural...

Recent work has shown that microeconomic shocks at the firm and sector level account for a substantial share of output volatility. We examine whether this relationship holds for house price growth volatility, which also declined during the Great Moderation and increased after 2001. Using a novel...

Models in the infinite horizon macro-housing literature often assume that borrowers are constrained exclusively by the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. Motivated by the Swedish micro-data, I explore an alternative arrangement where borrowers are constrained by the feasibility of repayment, but choose...

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...