Do Central Banks React to House Prices?

House Prices, Heterogeneous Banks and Unconventional Monetary Policy Options

This paper develops a financial mechanism which integrates housing and the real economy through housing-secured debt. In this environment, movements in home prices are amplified through both borrowers and banks’ balance sheets, leading to a self-reinforcing credit/liquidity crunch. When placed within a traditional business cycle model, this financial structure quantitatively captures empirical ...

What Should Central Banks Do?

I the last twenty years, there has been substantial rethinking about how central banks should do their job. This rethinking has led to major changes in how central banks operate, and we are now in an era in which central banks in many countries throughout the world have had notable success—keeping inflation low, while their economies experience rapid economic growth. In this lecture, I outline ...

Should Central Banks Lean Against Changes in Asset Prices?

How should monetary policy be conducted in the presence of endogenous feedback loops between asset prices, firms’ financial health, and economic activity? We reconsider this question in the context of the financial accelerator model and show that, when the level of natural output is inefficient, the optimal monetary policy under commitment leans considerably against movements in asset prices an...

Stock prices and house prices: Which one affects the other?

Stocks and houses as two major assets which play important role in the balance sheet of Iranian households. Changes in two markets have a large influence on wealth and the general economy. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between stock and house prices over a thirty-year period using vector auto-regression (VAR). Using yearly data for the period from 1985 to 2013, we con...

Spatial Lock-in: Do Falling House Prices Constrain Residential Mobility?