We study the general equilibrium of the housing market in an economy populated by overlapping generations of households. A contribution of the present paper is to solve for the housing market equilibrium in the presence of aggregate (interest rate) uncertainty with a realistic mortgage contract....

We decompose aggregate consumption by modelling both savers and their links to collateral constrained borrowers through a bank which prices credit risk. Savers own both firms and the commercial bank while borrowers require loans from the commercial bank to effect their consumption plans. The...

We build a model of the U.S. economy with multiple aggregate shocks (income, housing finance conditions, and beliefs about future housing demand) that generate fluctuations in equilibrium house prices. Through a series of counterfactual experiments, we study the housing boom and bust around...

The crisis has highlighted the importance of setting up macro-prudential oversight frameworks, having effective macro-prudential instruments in place to be called upon to mitigate growing financial imbalances as needed. We develop a new approach using the euro area Bank Lending Survey to assess...

We study the severity of liquidity constraints in the U.S. housing market using a life-cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in which houses are illiquid, but agents have the option to extract home equity by refinancing their long-term mortgages. The model implies that three quarters...

The house price-to-income ratio (PIR) is widely used as an affordability indicator. This paper complements the cross-sectionally focused literature by proposing a tractable model for the PIR dynamics. Our model predicts that the PIR is very persistent and is correlated to the lagged aggregate...