We quantify the impact of demographic change on real interest rates, house prices and household debt in an overlapping-generations model. Falling birth and death rates across advanced economies can explain much of the observed fall in real interest rates and the rise in house prices and...

Over the past four decades, real interest rates have risen then fallen across the industrialised world. Over the same period, nominal investment rates fell, while house prices and household debt ratios rose. I explain these four trends with a fifth — the widespread fall in the relative price...

Unlike many theoretical analysis of tax effects on household debts in a monetary union, this paper builds up analysis from a household budget constraint, instead of starting from a model. By a monetary union, it is assumed that all nations in the union share same currency. The size of tax...

Market innovations following the financial reforms of the early 1980's relaxed collateral constraints on households' borrowing. This paper examines the implications of this development for macroeconomic volatility. We combine collateral constraints on households with heterogeneity of thrift in a...

We show that the size of collateralized household debt determines an economy's vulnerability to crises of confidence. The house price feeds back on itself by contributing to a liquidity effect, which operates through the value of housing in a collateral constraint. Over a specific range of debt...

The Spanish economy is currently plagued by a deep recession with very high unemployment. We ask how much of the unemployment increase in Spain can be traced back to the debt deleveraging needs of Spanish households. We use provincial household debt and sectoral unemployment data and follow Mian...

In the era of financialisation, increasing income inequality could be observed in most developed and many developing countries. Despite these similar developments in inequality, the growth performance and drivers for growth differed markedly among countries, allowing clusters of different growth...

In this study, we set up a DSGE model with upward looking consumption comparison and show that consumption externalities are an important driver of consumer credit dynamics. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy's capital stock, own the...

This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a financial asset and...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...