The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act was enacted to monitor minority and low-income access to the mortgage market. The data collected for this purpose show that minorities are more than twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as whites. Yet variables correlated with both race and creditworthiness...

This paper explores a monetary-policy model with habit formation for consumers, in which consumers' utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption. The empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypothesis of no habit formation with...