Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

We use novel and unique data to study the effect of price changes in the market for luxury and middle class homes. We find that luxury home sales respond less to price changes than the middle-class home sales; in the market for luxury homes, past prices affect current prices; luxury home prices...

Mortgages are prime examples of long-term nominal loans. As a result, under incomplete asset markets, monetary policy can affect household decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. These channels are distinct from the transmission through...

Standard models used for monetary policy analysis rely on sticky prices. Recently, the literature started to explore also nominal debt contracts. Focusing on mortgages, this paper compares the two channels of transmission within a common framework. The sticky price channel is dominant when...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate constant quality price trends and analysing factors determining market prices for MDCBs (multi-dwelling and commercial buildings) in Sweden. We use high quality data for housing and municipality attributes and our database consists of almost 8500...

We document that home ownership of households with 'heads' aged 25-44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities seemingly made it...

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

This study explores an important aspect of how the Austrian banking sector contributes to the propagation of aggregate shocks. Time series data for the 1995-2003 period are applied to examine the cyclical variations in interest rate spreads. Differentials between interest rates on loans and...