Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

This paper revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatorycolonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources andpopulations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using 18thcentury Spanish American treasury accounts we show that localelites not only exerted important...

This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of ‘wealth effects?on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as ‘habits?in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

This paper examines the relationship between real estate prices during the home price boom from the late 1990s into 2005 and competition among mortgage lenders. The mortgage lending business, especially with the rise of the originate-to-distribute model, had competitors with very different...

This paper studies the association between the current account and real estate valuation across countries, subject to data availability [43 countries, of which 25 are OECD], during 1990 - 2005. We find robust and strong positive association between current account deficits and the appreciation...

The Chinese economy has undergone three major phases: the 1978-97 period marked as the SOE-led economy, the 1998-2015 phase as the investment-driven economy, and the new normal economy since 2016. All three economies have been shaped by the government financial policies, defined as a set of...

The paper uses Minsky's financial instability hypothesis as an analytical framework for understanding the subprime mortgage crisis and for introducing adequate reforms to restore economic stability. We argue that the subprime crisis has structural origins that extend far beyond the housing and...

Lending standards are a direct measure of credit conditions. We use the micro data merged from three separate sources to construct this measure and document that an uncertain macroeconomic outlook, rather than banks' balance sheet positions, was an important reason that a majority of banks...

This paper investigates the information in monthly nominal Swedish real estate stock market returns from 1939-1998. Thus we test the weak form efficient market hypothesis. Our results contradict previous findings from the general Swedish stock market as we find very little evidence of seasonal...

Despite the prevalence and high cost of real estate agents, there is limited empirical evidence as to the nature or efficacy of their services. In this paper we estimate real estate agents' value-added when either selling or buying homes using data from three large multiple listing services...