Against the background of recent house price increases in several European countries, the OeNB organized a workshop entitled "Are House Prices Endangering Financial Stability? If So, How Can We Counteract This?" It was held in Vienna on October 9 and 10, 2014. The workshop contributions...

Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both...

Now that Congress has passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, regulators promulgating the rules under this new bill must tackle a major problem that the reform bill addresses only indirectly. This is the problem of excessive “leverage” – financing with too...

We document a novel transmission channel of monetary policy through the homeowners insurance market. On average, contractionary monetary policy shocks result in higher homeowners insurance prices. Using granular data on insurers' balance sheets, we show that this effect is driven by the...

Using several different datasets obtained from the German Central Bank (Deutsche Bundesbank) and the German Federal Statistical Office, we provide empirical evidence that savings and loan contracts (SLCs) are a macrosocial phenomenon that smooths housing demand by setting countercyclical...

This paper analyzes the causes and implications of recent financial crises. Financial crises in general lead to changes in both theory and practice of economics. The paper takes an historical overview. The global consensus of economic theory during the 20th century is discussed. The paper...

This paper develops a two-region model of firm migration where moving is costly and firms have market power. In this setting, the decentralized equilibrium generates excessive inertia in firm movement relative to the 'first best' solution. Because the decentralized solution is inefficient, the...