scholarly journals Failure to Launch: Housing, Debt Overhang, and the Inflation Option

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Hedlund

Can inflating away nominal mortgage liabilities effectively combat recessions? I address this question using a model of illiquid housing, endogenous credit supply, and equilibrium default. I show that, in an ordinary recession, temporarily raising the inflation target has only modest or even counterproductive effects. However, during episodes like the Great Recession, inflation effectively boosts house prices, consumption, and dramatically cuts foreclosures, but only when fixed-rate mortgages are the dominant instrument. The quantitative implications of inflation also vary if other nominal rigidities or demand externalities are present. In the cross section, inflation delivers especially large gains to highly leveraged homeowners. (JEL D14, E31, E32, E52, G21, R31)

Author(s):  
Stefan Homburg

Chapter 6 examines real estate as a neglected feature of actual economies. It begins with an empirical overview demonstrating the preeminent role of land as a part of nonfinancial wealth. Whereas many macroeconomic models represent nonfinancial wealth by a symbol K that is interpreted as machines and equipment (if not robots), the text makes clear that such items are of minor quantitative importance. In contemporary economies, nonfinancial wealth consists chiefly of real estate. This is the proper reason so many analysts conjecture a link between house prices and the Great Recession. Changes in house prices (primarily changes in land prices) operate on the economy through their influence on nonfinancial wealth. Nonfinancial wealth affects consumption directly and investment indirectly since it relaxes or tightens borrowing constraints. Building on the results obtained in previous chapters, the text studies housing manias and leverage cycles and relates its main findings to US data.


Empirica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-861
Author(s):  
Maciej Ryczkowski

Abstract I analyse the link between money and credit for twelve industrialized countries in the time period from 1970 to 2016. The euro area and Commonwealth Countries have rather strong co-movements between money and credit at longer frequencies. Denmark and Switzerland show weak and episodic effects. Scandinavian countries and the US are somewhere in between. I find strong and significant longer run co-movements especially around booming house prices for all of the sample countries. The analysis suggests the expansionary policy that cleans up after the burst of a bubble may exacerbate the risk of a new house price boom. The interrelation is hidden in the short run, because the co-movements are then rarely statistically significant. According to the wavelet evidence, developments of money and credit since the Great Recession or their decoupling in Japan suggest that it is more appropriate to examine the two variables separately in some circumstances.


2016 ◽  
Vol 106 (5) ◽  
pp. 543-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Justiniano ◽  
Giorgio E. Primiceri ◽  
Andrea Tambalotti

The surge in credit and house prices that preceded the Great Recession was particularly pronounced in ZIP codes with a higher fraction of subprime borrowers (Mian and Sufi, 2009). We present a simple model with prime and subprime borrowers distributed across geographic locations, which can reproduce this stylized fact as a result of an expansion in the supply of credit. Due to their low income, subprime households are constrained in their ability to meet interest payments and hence sustain debt. As a result, when the supply of credit increases and interest rates fall, they take on disproportionately more debt than their prime counterparts, who are not subject to that constraint.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 925-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Barraza ◽  
Andrea Civelli ◽  
Nicola Zaniboni

We study the transmission mechanism of monetary policy through business loans and illustrate subtle aspects of its functioning that relate to the contractual characteristics and the borrower–lender types of loans. We show that the puzzling increase in business loans in response to monetary tightening, documented before the Great Recession, is largely driven by drawdowns from existing commitments at large banks. Spot loans also rise and take a considerable amount of time to adjust. Banks, nonetheless, do curtail credit supply by shortening maturities of new loans. Following the Great Recession, the mechanism has worked differently, with loan responses to monetary tightening displaying a significant downward shift.


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