Do consumers and merchants use the most efficient payment instruments? I examine how interchange fees, which are fees paid from merchants' banks to consumers' banks when card transactions take place, influence the choice between cash and payment cards. I show that when consumers do not pay...

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for explaining gains and losses in export market shares by considering both price and non-price determinants. Starting from a demand-side model à la Armington (1969), we relax several restrictive assumptions to evaluate the contribution of unobservable...

We propose a comprehensive decomposition of changes in a country's global market shares that accounts for the value added content of trade. We perform the analysis by combining two datasets - disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade with internationally integrated Supply and Use Tables from the...

This paper explores the link between agent expectations and housing market dynamics. We focus on shifts in the fundamental driving forces of the economy that are anticipated by rational forward-looking agents, i.e. news shocks. Using Bayesian methods and U.S. data, we find that...

Boom-bust cycles in real estate markets have been major factors in systemic financial crises and therefore need to be at the forefront of macroprudential policy. The geographically differentiated nature of real estate market fluctuations implies that these policies need to be granular across...

Results from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey reveal substantial variation in household net wealth across euro area countries that await explanation. This paper focuses on three main factors for the wealth accumulation process, i) homeownership, ii) housing value...

Crossing borders, be it international or regional, often go together with price, wage or indeed wealth discontinuities. This paper identifies substantial wealth differences between Luxembourg resident households and cross-border commuter households despite their similar incomes. The average...

Following a hedonic framework, this paper constructs various transaction-based commercial property price indicators for the Netherlands. Using quarterly data from the Investment Property Databank (IPD), the analysis covers a total of 10,000 listed properties over the period 2001-2011. The study...

Housing is one of the most important asset classes in developed economies, playing a central role in driving the credit cycle, the transmission of monetary policy, and overall economic activity. Our understanding of house price dynamics, particularly in the euro area, typically focusses on...

This paper provides the first study of climate risk pricing in euro area commercial real estate markets. We pay particular attention to changes in risk pricing over time, as a sudden market shift may significantly amplify the financial stability and macroeconomic implications of these risks. We...