This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred...

A foundation is provided for a correct and accurate analysis of the relationship between monetary values and physical dimensions in economic production. A distinction is proposed between direct and indirect substitution. Linked to this, a classification is offered of various types of...

Nancy Cartwright views models as blueprints for nomological machines - machines which, if properly shielded, generate lawlike behaviour or regularities. Marcel Boumans has argued that we can look for devices inside models which enable us to measure aspects of these regularities. So, if models do...

This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy. The framework used is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital, in which...

The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy. In...

We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships. We...

This paper reviews some recent developments in digital currency, focusing on platform-sponsored currencies such as Facebook Credits. In a model of platform management, we find that it will not likely be profitable for such currencies to expand to become fully convertible competitors to...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of housing-related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general-equilibrium model. The model features borrowing and lending across heterogeneous households, financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints tied to...

We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic generalequilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features. First, it allows for non-trivial...

This paper studies how the allocation of residual losses affects trading and welfare in a central counterparty. I compare loss sharing under two loss-allocation mechanisms - variation margin haircutting and cash calls - and study the privately and socially optimal degree of loss sharing. For...