This paper asks why monetary contractions have strong effects on the housing market. The paper presents a model with staggered housing adjustment in which monetary policy has real effects in the absence of any rigidity in producer pricing or wages. Limited participation in financial markets...

We analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle in a set of 51 U.S. cities. Most surprisingly, we find that declines in house prices are often not followed by declines in employment. We also find that national permits are a better leading indicator for a city's employment than...

It is well known that U.S. monetary policy is well-approximated by a Taylor rule. This suggests a reason why good macroeconomic news may not always increase equity returns: good news about the real side of the economy implies tighter future monetary policy. I test this hypothesis by assessing...

We quantify the effect of recourse on default and find that recourse affects default by lowering the borrower's sensitivity to negative equity. At the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans, borrowers are 30% more likely to default in non-recourse states. Furthermore, for homes...

Young borrowers are conventionally considered the most prone to making financial mistakes. This has spurred efforts to limit their access to credit, particularly via credit cards. Recent research suggests, however, that young borrowers are actually among the least likely to experience a serious...

I generate priors for a vector autoregression (VAR) from a standard real business cycle (RBC) model, an RBC model with capital-adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky-price model with an unaccommodating monetary authority. The response of hours worked to a TFP shock differs sharply...