This paper shows that rising real estate prices reduce industry productivity, because they lead to a reallocation of capital and labor towards inefficient firms. I establish that the rise in real estate value during the US housing boom relaxes firms' financial constraints. Companies borrow...

This paper develops a new measure of after-tax rate of return on aggregate wealth and uses it in estimating the structural relationship between the long-run interest rate and productivity growth rate. The structural approach allows use of parameter estimates in constructing projections for the...