The international financial crisis, which started in the United States at the end of 2007, hit Europe soon afterwards. Its impact on the old continent has been enormous. A number of country-specific crises were triggered, especially in the European periphery. This essay will focus on two...

Housing policies in Japan after World War II were focused on the quantitative supply of houses with a wide range of targeted groups and public rental houses. The Japan Housing Corporation (now the Urban Renaissance Agency) and the Government Housing Loan Corporation (now the Japan Housing...

On 15th November 2012 in Copenhagen, SUERF and Nykredit in association with Danmarks Nationalbank organised a conference on "Property prices and real estate financing in a turbulent world". The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the conference.

We empirically document that banks with greater exposure to high home price-to-income ratio regions in 2005 and 2006 have higher mortgage delinquency and charge-off rates and significantly higher probabilities of failure during the last financial crisis even after controlling for capital,...

This paper explores the implications of a housing market bubble for three critical elements of mortgage contract design: difference between term to maturity and amortization period; prepayment options; and, lender recourse in the event of default. Using an extension of classical immunization...