We examine the role of demographic change for regional convergence in living standards in Canada. Due to economies of scale within a family, decreasing household size has an impact on convergence in living standards, while per capita income convergence remains unaffected. We find that, by...

Households were surveyed in the days immediately before and after the June release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI release was associated with an 11 percentage point increase in the likelihood that a respondent heard news about inflation, with a larger increase for highly-numerate...

Housing prices and household borrowing are expected to be tightly connected to each other. Better availability of credit eases liquidity constraints of households, which is likely to lead to higher demand for housing. On the other hand, housing prices may significantly influence household...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

Housing is an important sector of the economy. It has widespread implications for investment, banking, saving and employment. Home ownership has been linked to building social capital and a sense of community. Furthermore housing equity is a significant element of retirement accumulation for...

I analyze new data on subjective probabilistic expectations on house prices collected in the Spanish Survey of Household Finances. Households are asked to distribute ten points among five different scenarios for the change in the price of their homes over the next 12 months. This paper is the...

The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors...

Young Americans' residence choices have changed markedly over the past fifteen years, with recent cohorts entering the housing market at lower rates, and lingering much longer in parents' households. This paper begins with descriptive evidence on the residence choices of 1 percent of young...

This paper uses the most recent wave of a nationally representative dataset to examine the factors associated with elderly homeowners' decision to obtain reverse mortgage loans. The findings of this study suggest that very few homeowners participated in the reverse mortgage market, and...

We solve a rich life-cycle model of household decisions involving consumption of perishable goods and housing services, habit formation for housing consumption, stochastic labor income, stochastic house prices, home renting and owning, stock investments, and portfolio constraints. In line with...