This paper addresses the popular view that differences in financial development explain the pattern of global current account imbalances. One strain of thinking explains the net flow of capital from developing to industrial economies on the basis of the industrial economies' more advanced...

This paper explores the baby boom's impact on U.S. house prices and interest rates in the post-war 20th century and beyond. Using a simple Lucas asset pricing model, I quantitatively account for the increase in real house prices, the path of real interest rates, and the timing of low-frequency...

This paper examines periods of pronounced rises and falls of real house prices since 1970 in eighteen major industrial countries, with particular focus on the lessons for monetary policy. We find that real house prices are pro-cyclical - co-moving with real GDP, consumption, investment, CPI...

We study consumption of durable and nondurable goods when the durable good is subject to transaction costs. In the model, agents derive utility from a service flow of a durable good and a consumption flow of a nondurable good. The key feature of the model is the existence of a fixed transaction...

We test if a standard representative agent model with a home-production sector can resolve the equity premium or value premium puzzles. In this model, agents value market consumption and a home consumption good that is produced as an aggregate of the stock of housing, home labor, and a...

Building on the panel-regression approach of <link rid="b11">Chinn and Prasad (2003</link>) and <link rid="b14">Gruber and Kamin (2007</link>), we assess whether differences in financial development can explain the large developing-country surpluses or large US deficits. We find little evidence to support these hypotheses. We also assess...

We analyze the decline in the U.S. share of world merchandise exports against the backdrop of a model-based measure of competitiveness. We preliminarily use constant market share analysis and gravity estimations to show that the majority of the decline in export shares can be associated with a...