Housing markets and their cycles are central to understanding macroeconomic fluctuations. As housing is an inherently spatial market, an understanding of the economics of location-specific amenities is needed. This paper examines this topic, using a rich dataset of over 1.2 million sales and...

This paper analyzes the boom–bust cycle driven by rational bubbles in an overlapping generations economy that is subject to borrowing constraints. At the heart of the analysis is the interplay among savings, investment, and the interest rate. Bubbles are more likely to crowd investment in, the...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative effects of speculative bubbles on capital accumulation, growth, and welfare. A near-rational bubble component in the model equity price generates excess volatility in response to observed technology shocks. In...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity in a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts. As in Lorenzoni andWalentin (2007) optimal financial contracts under limited enforcement imply that to obtain external finance firms have to post collateral in...

Recent studies proposed news about future technology growth as the main driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. The identification of these news through stock prices in SVARs has been criticized in the past. Therefore, I propose a series of experiments to test that hypothesis by examining its...

Stock prices slowly adjust after the peak of a business cycle. High stock prices during the months following the peak result in a lower cost of capital for firms. Investment is much higher than it would be otherwise. We estimate a dynamic macroeconomic model in four variables: investment, stock...

We explore the implications of shocks to expected future productivity. In a setting with limited enforcement of financial contracts, firms have to post collateral to obtain external finance. In a real one-sector model with this type of "collateral constraint", positive news about future...

Using U.S. data from 1926 to 2015, I show that financial skewness?a measure comparing cross-sectional upside and downside risks of the distribution of stock market returns of financial firms?is a powerful predictor of business cycle fluctuations. I then show that shocks to financial skewness are...