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Working Paper
Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts
In advanced economies, a century-long near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This ?financial hockey stick? coincides with shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely-noted return of macroeconomic fragility and crisis risk. Leverage is correlated with central business cycle moments, which we can document thanks to a decade-long international and historical data collection effort. More financialized economies exhibit somewhat less real volatility, but also lower growth, more tail risk, as well ...
Working Paper
Betting the House
Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection ...
Report
Superstar Returns
We study long-term returns on residential real estate in twenty-seven “superstar” cities in fifteen countries over 150 years. We find that total returns in superstar cities are close to 100 basis points lower per year than in the rest of the country. House prices tend to grow faster in the superstars, but rent returns are substantially greater outside the big agglomerations, resulting in higher long-run total returns. The excess returns outside the superstars can be rationalized as a compensation for risk, especially for higher co-variance with income growth and lower liquidity. Superstar ...
Working Paper
Global Financial Cycles and Risk Premiums
This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is particularly notable. We demonstrate that fluctuations in risk premiums, and not risk-free rates and dividends, account for a large part of the observed equity price synchronization after 1990. We also show that U.S. monetary policy has come to play an important role as a source of fluctuations in risk ...
Journal Article
Private credit and public debt in financial crises
Recovery from a recession triggered by a financial crisis is greatly influenced by the government?s fiscal position. A financial crisis puts considerable stress on the government?s budget, sometimes triggering attacks on public debt. Historical analysis shows that a private credit boom raises the odds of a financial crisis. Entering such a crisis with a swollen public debt may limit the government?s ability to respond and can result in a considerably slower recovery.
Journal Article
Monetary Policy Medicine: Large Effects from Small Doses?
If inflation increases rapidly, how do we know that higher interest rates will bring prices under control? And how do we know how much of the monetary ?medicine? to administer? Economics relies primarily on observational data to answer such questions, while medical research uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate treatments. Applying that method to economics, the long history of international finance turns out to be an excellent laboratory to conduct monetary experiments. These experiments suggest that interest rates have sizable effects on the economy.
Working Paper
Financial Liberalizations, Booms, and Crashes
Financial liberalization is often seen as a way to deepen credit markets and stimulate economic growth, but it may also fuel credit booms that end in crisis. We construct a new cross-country database of banking regulation policies covering 21 regulatory indicators for 18 advanced economies since World War II. We distinguish liberalizations that directly relax constraints on credit supply from broader financial reforms. Liberalizations that directly affect credit supply lead to substantial expansions in private credit. Credit expansion is concentrated in non-tradable sectors and is not ...
Report
Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality
This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock exacerbates the wealth difference between black and white ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality
This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock exacerbates the wealth difference between black and white ...
Journal Article
The College Wealth Divide: Education and Inequality in America, 1956-2016
Using new long-run microdata, this article studies wealth and income trends of households with a college degree (college households) and without a college degree (noncollege households) in the United States since 1956. We document the emergence of a substantial college wealth premium since the 1980s, which is considerably larger than the college income premium. Over the past four decades, the wealth of college households has tripled. By contrast, the wealth of noncollege households has barely grown in real terms over the same period. Part of the rising wealth gap can be traced back to ...