The paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and in the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market, such as the real house price, residential investment and mortgage...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

Using a dedicated set of questions in the 2014 Luxembourg Household Finance and Consumption Survey (LU-HFCS), we show that a substantial share of households contributes their own labour to the acquisition of their main residence. These contributions help households faced with credit constraints,...

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of the preferential treatment of owner-occupied housing in Europe. We find that tax benefits to homeowners reduce the user cost of housing capital by almost 40 percent compared to the efficient level under neutral taxation. On average, the tax...

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We use data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify...

This paper provides estimates of price-marginal cost ratios or markups for 50 sectors in 8 euro area countries and the US over the period 1981-2004. The estimates are obtained applying the methodology developed by Roeger (1995) on the EU KLEMS March 2007 database. Five stylized facts are...

We use a version of the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM) developed at the ECB in order to quantify the gains from monetary policy cooperation. The model is calibrated in order to match a set of empirical moments. We then derive the cooperative and (open-loop) Nash monetary policies, assuming that the...

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

We estimate the degree of "stickiness" in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...