It is widely acknowledged that the recent generation of DSGE models failed to incorporate many of the liquidity and financial accelerator mechanisms revealed in the global financial crisis that began in 2007. This paper complements the papers presented at the 2009 BIS annual conference focused...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to externalfinance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household ExternalFinance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgagecontracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modeled using quantile regressions. Wepropose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the taxtreatment of housing...

Strong procyclical fluctuations in the durable production are the most prominent featureof the empirical response to monetary shocks. This paper investigates the role of preferencesin matching this feature of the data in a two-sector sticky price model with flexibly priceddurables. The reaction...

We propose a simple and powerful method for determining the transition processin continuous-time DSGE models under Poisson uncertainty numerically. The idea isto transform the system of stochastic dierential equations into a system of functionaldierential equations of the retarded type. We then...

We characterize how public insurance schemes are constrained by hidden financialtransactions. When non-exclusive private insurance entails increasing unit transaction costs,public transfers are only partly offset by hidden private transactions, and can influenceconsumption allocation. We show...

Financial markets provide imperfect insurance of labor income risk. However, workers can partly insure against labor market risk by commuting to adjacent regions. Since commuters own wage claims to output produced in adjacent regions, the business cycle in the neighborhood becomes a relevant...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to anincrease in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfaredepend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data onconsumption and income to...

This paper explores the optimal risk sharing arrangement between generations in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. We allow for nonseparable preferences, paying particular attention to the risk aversion of the old as well as overall “life-cycle” risk aversion. We provide...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...