This paper makes a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the debate on what caused the "global imbalances". On the empirical side, I provide different types of evidence to support that housing demand shocks (shocks to the aggregate marginal rate of substitution between housing and...

This paper makes two contributions. On the theory side, I show that increases in the demand for housing may generate trade deficits without need for the standard ingredients used by others to model housing (wealth effects or trade in capital goods). Housing is a durable good that must be locally...

In this paper we study a new factor that matters for fertility and consumption decisions: the risks associated with having and raising a child. We analyze a real options model with incomplete markets to explicitly model both children as a risky investment and the parental option to time...

This paper studies children as a risky asset associated to an investment option. Children provide utility but have a stochastic maintenance cost. We obtain several new results relative to models where children are deterministic goods, among which: i) Higher child risks diminish fertility and...

We study the optimal hiring and firing decisions of a firm under two different firing costs regulations: 1) Dual labor markets characterized by high firing costs for workers with seniority above a threshold ("permanent workers") and by low costs for "temporary workers". 2) The Single Labor...

We study policies that regulate executive compensation in a model that jointly determines executives effort, compensation and firm leverage. The market failure that justifies regulation is that executives are optimistic about asset prices in states of distress. We show that shareholders propose...

We analyze the removal of the credit-risk guarantees provided by the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) in a model with agents heterogeneous in income and house price risk. We find that wealth inequality increases, driven by higher mortgage spreads and housing rents. Housing holdings become...

We show that a contraction of mortgage supply after the Great Recession has increased housing rents. Our empirical strategy exploits heterogeneity in MSAs' exposure to regulatory shocks experienced by lenders over the 2010-2014 period. Tighter lending standards have increased demand for rental...

We propose a quantitative model of lending standards with two reasons for inefficient credit: lenders' moral hazard from deposit insurance or government guarantees, and imperfect information about the persistence of asset price growth, which generates incorrect but rational beliefs in the...

This paper proposes a tractable way to incorporate lending standards ("credit qualification thresholds") into macro models of financial frictions. Banks can reject borrowers whose risk is above an endogenous threshold at which no lending rate sufficiently compensates banks for the borrowers'...