The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed information on how respondents acquired their main residence and any other real estate. This information is used to estimate the impact of inter vivos transfers on the saving period required to purchase a house and on the...

This paper evaluates the macroeconomic and distributional effects of government bailout guarantees for Government Sponsored Enterprises (such as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac) in the mortgage market. In order to do so we construct a model with heterogeneous, infinitely lived households and...

The Netherlands is one of the most flood prone countries in the world. It also has the best flood defenses in the world that are built to make floods an extremely rare event. This paper uses the unique Dutch setting to provide evidence on the price and perception of rare environmental disasters....

This study examines the behavior of Swiss house prices to immigration flows for 85 districts from 2001 to 2006. The results show that the nexus between immigration and house prices holds even in an environment of low house price inflation and modest immigration flows. An immigration inflow equal...

In this paper we study the transmission of income shocks into nondurable consumption in the presence of durable goods. We use a standard a life-cycle model with two goods to characterize the interaction of durability of goods, durability of shocks, and borrowing constraints as determinants of...

We show theoretically that income redistribution benefits borrowing-constrained individuals more than is implied by standard relative-income and uninsurable-risk considerations. Empirically, we find in international opinion-survey data that younger and lower-income individuals express stronger...

Abstract. U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, and has been falling since. This leveraging (and deleveraging) cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization, and subsequent tightening, of credit standards in mortgage markets observed during the same period. We base this...

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...

Changes in credit market architecture are an important but unobservable structural influence on economic activity. For Australian data, we model non-price credit supply conditions within equilibrium correction models of consumption, house prices, mortgage credit and housing equity withdrawal....