Why are asset prices so much more volatile and so often detached from their fundamental values? Why does the bursting of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these questions by constructing an infinite-horizon heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model with...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level data set that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

Using detailed micro data at the ZIP code level, this article explores the regional variation in housing market performance to account for the severity of the Great Recession. The granularity of the data, relative to a more traditional analysis at the county level, is useful for evaluating the...

We study quantitatively how far shifts in the credit supply can generate a boom-bust cycle, similar to the one observed in the US around 2008. For this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model that combines a rich heterogeneous agent overlapping-generations structure of households who...

Balance of payment crises, characterized by Sudden Stops, are not a phenomenon exclusive to emerging economies. This paper identifies 16 and 50 crises in advanced and emerging economies, respectively. Further, decomposing the Financial Account uncovers important differences between both groups...

1. This research examines the potential impact of the stock market crash of 2008-2009 on U.S. working households. The Great Recession caused financial problems for many households in terms of unemployment, business losses, and decreases in real estate values, but the broadly based decreases in...

This paper uses a multi region DSGE model with collateral constrained households and residential investment to examine the effectiveness of fiscal policy stimulus measures in a credit crisis. The paper explores alternative scenarios which differ by the type of budgetary measure, its length, the...

We estimate a medium scale DSGE model for the Euro area with Limited Asset Market Participation (LAMP). Our results suggest that in the recent EMU years LAMP is particularly sizeable (393 during 1993-2012) and important to understand business cycle features. The Bayes factor and the forecasting...