We incorporate house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. We calibrate the model to match U.S. data, and we show that the model also accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle prole of homeownership,...

During the last global recession, house prices fell in some European countries almost as much as in some U.S. states. However, mortgage defaults occurred at a much lower rate in Europe. The authors say the difference might be explained by two regulations that apply in Europe but are used on a...

Home equity did not increase much for households younger than 35 years of age between 1998 and 2007 because the increase in house prices was offset by an equivalent increase in mortgage debt.

This paper argues that both horizontal and intertemporal competition among recipient governments are needed in order to ensure incentives for effective utilization of targeted transfers. This has implications for budgeting frameworks and the types of information needed that might be amenable to...

This paper studies an economy with credit risk in which, as in Bizer and DeMarzo (1992), borrowers cannot commit to exclusive contracts with lenders. In contrast with Bizer and DeMarzo (1992), we study a framework with multiple borrowing periods. In particular, we remove the exclusive-contract...

We propose a sovereign default framework that allows us to quantify the importance of the debt dilution problem in accounting for overborrowing and sovereign default risk. We find that debt dilution accounts for 12% of the mean debt level and almost 100% of the sovereign default risk in the...

This paper studies an economy with credit risk in which borrowers cannot commit to exclusive contracts with lenders as in Bizer and DeMarzo (1992). But we study a framework with multiple borrowing periods. In particular, we remove the exclusive contracts assumption from a baseline model of...

We quantify gains from introducing non-defaultable debt as a limited additional financing option into a model of equilibrium sovereign risk. We find that, for an initial (defaultable) sovereign debt level equal to 66 percent of trend aggregate income and a sovereign spread of 2.9 percent,...

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign...

This paper provides a theoretical framework for quantitatively investigating the optimal accumulation of international reserves as a hedge against rollover risk. We study a dynamic model of endogenous default in which the government faces a tradeoff between the insurance benefits of reserves and...