A number of OECD countries experienced an environment of low interest rates and a rapid increase in housing market activity during the last decade. Previous work suggests three potential explanations for these events: expansionary monetary policy, capital inflows due to a global savings glut and...

This paper assesses the extent to which common factors underlie indicators of vulnerability to financial crises in emerging market economies and whether this link is changing over time. We use a Bayesian dynamic common factor model to estimate their common component in a sample of up to 41...

A range of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the boom in house prices that occurred in the United States from the mid-1990s to 2007. This paper considers the relative importance of two of these hypotheses. First, global imbalances increased liquidity in the US financial system, driving...