There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price...

Financial intermediaries issue the majority of liquid securities, and nonfinancial firms have become net savers, holding intermediaries' debt as cash. This paper shows that intermediaries' liquidity creation stimulates growth -- firms hold their debt for unhedgeable investment needs -- but also...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modeling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

We describe a general equilibrium model with a banking system in which the deposit bank collects deposits from households and the merchant bank provides funds to firms. The merchant bank borrows collateralized short-term funds from the deposit bank. In an economic downturn, as the value of...

During the Great Recession home equity loan balances increased despite aggregate home equity falling (and overall debt not changing). Entrepreneurs are responsible for 77% of this increase, while only representing 13% of the population. I argue that this reflects entrepreneurs having to rely on...

The main goal of every banking institution is to operate profitably in order to maintain stability and sustainable growth. However, the existence of high levels of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the banking industry negatively affects the level of private investment, impair a bank’s ability to...

We examine the real effects of changes in bank mortgage loan underwriting standards by combining responses to the Federal Reserve's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, application information from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and local housing market measures over 1990 to 2013. Tightened...

Based on archival and survey data we show that the maturity of U.S. business loans has been continuously increasing since the mid-1930s when banks invented the term loan. Concurrently, bank innovation first involved the invention of credit analysis and covenant design. Later, bank innovation...

Studies on denial rates in mortgage lending do not adequately account for lender heterogeneity due to divergent underwriting or regulatory practices. Using a sample of over two million home purchase mortgage applications from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data between 2018-2020, we...