This paper presents a dynamic theory of housing market fluctuations. It develops a life-cycle model where households are heterogeneous with respect to income and preferences, and mortgage lending is restricted by a down-payment requirement. The market interaction of young credit-constrained...

We study the role of institutional characteristics of mortgage markets in affecting the strength and timing of the effects of monetary policy shocks on house prices and consumption in a sample of OECD countries. With frictionless credit markets, those characteristics should in principle be...

We investigate possible determinants of the increase of household debt and smaller consumption fluctuations since the 1980s in the US. We use a heterogeneous-agent model, in which labor income is risky and markets are incomplete. Consumers use durables not only as collateral for their debt but...

The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the...

This paper presents a first step towards a new theory of housing market fluctuations. We develop a life-cycle model where agents face credit constraints and their housing consumption is restricted to a discrete set of possibilities. The market interaction of young credit constrained agents...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to study the impact of the 2003 dividend and capital gains tax cuts. Firms are heterogeneous in productivity and make investment and financing decisions subject to capital adjustment costs, equity issuance costs, and collateral constraints. Our...