During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

We incorporate house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. We calibrate the model to match U.S. data, and we show that the model also accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle profile of home...

The paper elicits a mechanism by which private leverage choices exhibit strategic complementarities through the reaction of monetary policy. When everyone engages in maturity transformation, authorities have little choice but facilitating refinancing. In turn, refusing to adopt a risky balance...

We endogenize the liquidity and the quality of private assets in a tractable incomplete-market model with heterogeneous agents. The model decomposes the convenience yield of government bond into a "liquidity premium" (flight to liquidity) and a "safety premium" (flight to quality) over the...