This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of uncertainty originating in the financial sector. My contribution is twofold. First, I document empirical relevenace of financial uncertainty using SVAR methods. Then, I employ the DSGE framework developed by Gertler and Karadi (2011) to...

How sizable is the wealth effect on consumption in euro area countries? To address this question, we use newly available harmonized euro area wealth data and the methodology in Carroll et al. (2011b). We find that the marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth averaged across the largest...

According to economie theory, the intertemporal budget constraint of households implies that a permanent increase in wealth should have a positive effect on consumer spending. Given the comparatively strong increase in Swiss household wealth over the past few years, the question of the extent to...

Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

The low nominal interest rate environment is a hotly debated phenomenon among politicians, financial market participants and households. Savers fear the erosion of their retirement savings, while financial supervisors warn of the stability risks caused by declining bank profitability and by the...

I use new micro data to study the effects of credit deregulation on the Norwegian household savings decline in the mid-1980s. This paper has three main findings. First, the decline in saving started in 1983, a couple of years earlier than previously thought on the basis of National Accounts...

The house price level is a function of buyers' realized home equity, and buyers' realized home equity is a function of the house price level. This interdependence follows from the fact that buyers are sellers in the same market. This article examines under what conditions this leads to a...

This paper proposes an integrated framework to analyze jointly two key issues: the emergence of global imbalances and the precautionary motive for accumulating reserves. Standard models of general equilibrium would predict modest current account surpluses in the emerging markets if they face...

In this paper we use a representative consumer model to analyse the equilibrium relation between the transitory deviations from the common trend among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income, cay, and focus on the implications for both stock returns and housing returns. The evidence...

In this paper, we show, using the consumer's budget constraint, that the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income should predict both stock returns and housing returns. We use quarterly data for a panel of 31 emerging economies and find that,...