The most frequent mortgage loans in the US behave according to nominal interest rates with level loan payments (NRMs), like Fixed Rate Mortgages (FRMs) or Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs). We use a model to show that the tilt effect, an increase of real payments in the early years of the...

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...

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...