Search Results
Journal Article
Measuring the contribution of construction to the slow recovery
Recovery of the construction sector seems a necessary ingredient for a strong and sustained recovery of economic activity and a reduction in the unemployment rate.
Working Paper
Accounting for changes in the homeownership rate
After three decades of being relatively constant, the homeownership rate increased over the 1994?2005 period to attain record highs. The objective of this paper is to account for the observed boom in ownership by examining the role played by changes in demographic factors and innovations in the mortgage market that lessened down payment requirements. To measure the aggregate and distributional impact of these factors, we construct a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping-generation model with housing. We find that the long-run importance of the introduction of new mortgage products for ...
Journal Article
Was China's Housing Boom a Bubble?
This article investigates the factors influencing nationwide and city-level house price trends in China during the 2000s and early 2010s, considering the country’s significant structural transformation and urbanization. The analysis reveals that "fundamental forces" effectively explain house price appreciation at the national level and in most cities, with Beijing and Shanghai being notable exceptions. Income growth is the primary driver of rising house prices, while population growth also plays a significant role. However, in many cases, the impact of population growth on house prices is ...
Working Paper
Did housing policies cause the postwar boom in homeownership?
After the collapse of housing markets during the Great Depression, the U.S. government played a large role in shaping the future of housing finance and policy. Soon thereafter, housing markets witnessed the largest boom in recent history. The objective in this paper is to quantify the contribution of government interventions in housing markets in the expansion of U.S. homeownership using an equilibrium model of tenure choice. In the model, home buyers have access to a menu of mort- gage choices to finance the acquisition of a house. The government also provides special programs through ...
Journal Article
Intertemporal discounting and policy selection
The choice of the intertemporal discount rate affects the measurement of the tax burden of different age cohorts. Small changes in the discount rate affect not only the magnitude of the measured changes, but also the ranking of policies using that metric. The authors illustrate this problem in the context of neutral Social Security reforms. By construction, these policies do not change allocations; hence, they also do not change welfare. However, depending on the choice of the discount rate, one could reach different (and possibly opposite) conclusions regarding the desirability of such ...
Ready for the Pandemic? Household Debt before the COVID-19 Shock
Before the pandemic, shares of delinquencies had already been growing in consumer finance loans, credit card debt, student loans and auto loans. And delinquencies can vary greatly among states.
Working Paper
Indirect taxation and the welfare effects of altruism on the optimal fiscal policy
This paper analyzes the welfare effects of altruism on the optimal fiscal policy. The existence of positive bequests links present and future generations in the economy. We show that these altruistic links provide a new role for indirect taxation (consumption and estate taxes) with important welfare implications. We use three different altruistic approaches (warm-glow, dynastic, and family) to illustrate how the presence of bequests in the budget constraint of the donee gives the government the ability to use indirect taxation to mimic lump-sum taxation and to implement the first-best outcome ...
Journal Article
Predicting the Yield Curve Inversions that Predict Recessions: Part 1
Current macroeconomic indicators generally decrease before recessions, but not before yield curve inversions.
Journal Article
Mind the regional output gap
This national outlook masks significant variation among states in their paths to recovery.
Journal Article
The Homeownership Experience of Minorities During the Great Recession
It has been argued that during the Great Recession, wealth losses were more concentrated for college-educated Black and Hispanic families than for White and Asian college-educated families and their non-college-educated Black and Hispanic peers. This article explores the extent to which the homeownership experience for families who purchased homes between 2004 and 2008 is a potentially important factor in explaining this finding. During the housing boom, the increase in homeownership for Blacks and Hispanics was very similar, but the second group had a smaller decline. Despite these ...