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...

This paper develops a notion of consumer confidence within a dynamic competitive equilibrium framework. In any situation where multiple equilibrium prices on next‐period spot markets are equally supported by the state of the economy, confidence is encoded in the subjective probabilities...