We develop a nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium model with a banking sector and use it to study the macroeconomic impact of introducing a minimum liquidity standard for banks on top of existing capital adequacy requirements. The model generates a distribution of bank sizes arising from...

Bank lending is an important source of funding for firms. Most loans are in the form of credit lines. Empirical studies of line demand have been complicated by their use of data on publicly traded firms, which have a wide menu of financing options. We avoid this problem by using a unique...

The sophistication of financial decisions varies with age: middle-aged adults borrow at lower interest rates and pay fewer fees compared to both younger and older adults. We document this pattern in ten financial markets. The measured effects cannot be explained by observed risk characteristics....

We measure learning and forgetting dynamics using a panel with four million monthly credit card statements. Through negative feedback -- i.e. paying a fee -- consumers learn to avoid future fees. Paying a fee last month reduces fee payment in the current month by 40%. Monthly fee payments fall...

Taking the mean-variance portfolio model as a benchmark, we compute the optimally diversified portfolio for banks located in France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. under different assumptions about currency hedging. We compare these optimal portfolios to the actual cross-border assets of banks...

In cross-sectional data sets from ten credit markets, we find that middle-aged adults borrow at lower interest rates and pay fewer fees relative to younger and older adults. Fee and interest payments are minimized around age 53. The measured effects are not explained by observed risk...

This paper tests for the presence of a credit channel (particularly a bank-lending sub-channel) for monetary policy in the housing market. We argue that the importance of this channel for investment in residential housing is highly dependent on the structural features, and particularly the...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) approach is used to identify the forces driving house prices fluctuations in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK over the period 1970-1998. Quarterly time series for real house prices, GDP, money, inflation and interest rates are...

This paper investigates the benefits of allowing households to compensate the portfolio distortion due to their housing consumption through investments in housing price derivatives. Focusing on the London market, we show that a major loss from over-investment in housing is that households are...