The fact that members of an immigrant community may have different demographiccharacteristics, or may have different tastes, to the indigenous population, may manifestitself in differences in saving behaviour. In addition, depending on their ethnicbackground, there could be differences among the...

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 estimates the wealth effects on consumption in the euro area as a whole. Ishow that: (i) financial wealth effects are relatively large and statistically significant;(ii) housing wealth effects are virtually nil and not significant; (iii) consumptiongrowth exhibits strong persistence...

The aim of this study is to examine the underlying dimensions of self-stated attitudesand behaviour concerning everyday financial affairs, and classify individuals basedon those dimensions. A questionnaire was answered by 1282 respondents in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The sample of...

I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics)must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employa wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of...

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...