In a recent paper, Leamer (2007) identified housing as an important precursor of the national business cycle. Previous work, on the other hand, has shown that regional cycles may not be synchronous with the aggregate cycle. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between housing and the...

I generate priors for a vector autoregression (VAR) from a standard real business cycle (RBC) model, an RBC model with capital-adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky-price model with an unaccommodating monetary authority. The response of hours worked to a TFP shock differs sharply...

In this paper we investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic...