The paper presents a model of housing and credit cycles featuring distorted beliefs and comovement and mutual reinforcement between house price expectations and price developments via credit expansion/contraction. Positive (negative) development in house prices fuels optimism (pessimism) and...

This paper considers the implications of habit formation and financial frictions for the propagation of macroeconomic shocks. In a model that is capable of matching asset pricing moments, a short-lived shock that destroys a small fraction of the economy's stock of pledgeable collateral generates...

We document the cyclical properties of unsecured consumer credit (procyclical and volatile) and of consumer bankruptcies (countercyclical and very volatile). Using a growth model with household heterogeneity in earnings and assets with access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and...

This paper studies the effects of labor market outcomes on firms' loan demand and on credit intermediation. In a first step, I investigate how wages in the production sector affect bank net worth and the process of financial intermediation in partial equilibrium. Second, the role of the...

This paper examines credit market policies under pecuniary externalities induced by collateral constraints. Pigouvian taxes/subsidies on debt or savings are derived as Ramsey-optimal policies. Firstly, prudential (ex-ante) debt taxes can restore constrained efficiency. Secondly, when policies...

We study the implications of undiversified investors in a production-based asset pricing model with rare disasters. In our model, households experience idiosyncratic shocks to human capital and partially invest their wealth in a single firm with idiosyncratic shocks. The model features tractable...

This paper examines the development processes of a country when the degree of verifiability is endogenously determined. We assume that labor input into the enforcement sector is necessary for improving the degree of verifiability. The main result is that although efforts to improve verifiability...

During the last two decades, the degree of openness of national financial systems has increased substantially. At the same time, asymmetries in information and other financial market frictions have remain prevalent. We study both empirically and theoretically the implications of the opening up...

In an overlapping generations economy with (incomplete) financial markets but no intermediaries, there is underinvestment in safe assets. In an economy with intermediaries and no financial markets, accumulating reserves of safe assets allows returns to be smoothed, nondiversifiable risk to be...

The difference in unemployment rates between the U.S. and Europe is well documented. In this paper, we develop a model with frictional labor, goods and credit markets to understand how differences in unemployment rates across the U.S. and Europe can be explained by differences in income tax...