We consider loans being marked to market to constitute new information that is only immediately available to large institutional traders, so-called qualified institutional buyers (QIBs). Smaller investors (non-QIBs) do not have instant access to such information. Investigating the effects of...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economic development has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. While classical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, the neoclassical paradigm dismissed the...

We show that easier access to credit significantly increases house prices by using exogenous changes in the conforming loan limit as an instrument for lower cost of financing. Houses that become eligible for financing with a conforming loan show an increase in house value of 1.16 dollars per...

In the past decade, most of the EU New Member States experienced a severe credit-boom bust cycle. This paper argues that the credit boom-bust cycle was to a large extent the result of factors external to the region (“bad luck�). Rapid credit growth followed from a high liquidity in...

This paper studies the role of credit-supply factors in business cycle fluctuations. For this purpose, we introduce an imperfectly competitive banking sector into a DSGE model with financial frictions. Banks issue collateralized loans to both households and firms, obtain funding via deposits and...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...