The paper discusses the latest economic crisis and the public policies used to mitigate the recession and improve the economic growth. The current target rate (monetary policy) is closed to zero since December 2008 with a new experimental policy (“quantitative easing”) to stimulate...

In this paper we assess whether persistently too low interest rates can cause housing bubbles. For a sample of 14 OECD countries, we calculate the deviations of house prices from their (theoretically implied) fundamental value and define them as bubbles. We then estimate the impact that a...

I study the general equilibrium of the housing market in an economy populated by over-lapping generations of households. A contribution of the present paper is to solve for the housing market equilibrium in the presence of aggregate (interest rate) uncertainty with a realistic mortgage contract....

This paper considers an equilibrium/error correction modelling (ECM) approach to identify determinants of mortgage portfolio default rates at firm level. Using mortgage portfolio data from a UK lender we estimated the lender's portfolio concentration weights in different UK regions to estimate...

The increase in household debts in Malaysia which has escalated to about 86% of total GDP is deemed to be at worrying stage as it may in turn trigger another financial crisis. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the increase in household debts and its relation to GDP, interest rate and...

The interrelationship between house prices and mortgage credit has been one of the more compelling issues to warrant attention after the recent financial crisis. Considerable financial innovation and liberalisation of wholesale international funding markets over the past 20 years greatly...

A series of empirical studies has documented that job search behavior depends on the financial situation of the unemployed. Starting from this observation, we ask how unemployment insurance policy should take the individual financial situation into account. We use a quantitative model with a...