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“Too-big-to-fail” is consistent with policies followed by private bank clearing houses during financial crises in the U.S. National Banking Era prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Private bank clearing houses provided emergency lending to member banks during financial crises. This behavior strongly suggests that “too-big-to-fail” is not the problem causing modern crises. Rather it is a reasonable response to the threat posed to large banks by the vulnerability of short-term debt to runs.

The securities settlement literature indicates that centralized settlement can reduce monitoring incentives and lead to excessive risk-taking and inefficient risk-sharing. This paper examines broker-failure rates and counterparty losses surrounding the transition from bilateral to multilateral settlement facilitated by the NYSE. Study results provide evidence that net settlement reduced failures without diminishing risk constraining incentives. The study constructs a controlled comparison of broker failures through data collected from the NYSE and the Consolidated Stock Exchange, which traded identical securities settled under different systems. The results suggest that multilateral settlement is advantageous when financial markets are highly stressed.

Using novel survey data, we document that individuals extrapolate from recent personal experiences when forming expectations about aggregate economic outcomes. Recent locally experienced house price movements affect expectations about future U.S. house price changes and higher experienced house price volatility causes respondents to report a wider distribution over expected U.S. house price movements. When we exploit within-individual variation in employment status, we find that individuals who personally experience unemployment become more pessimistic about future nationwide unemployment. The extent of extrapolation is unrelated to how informative personal experiences are, is inconsistent with risk adjustment, and is more pronounced for less sophisticated individuals.

We study the relationship between homebuyers’ beliefs about future house price changes and their mortgage leverage choices. Whether more pessimistic homebuyers choose higher or lower leverage depends on their willingness and ability to reduce the size of their housing market investments. When households primarily maximize the levered return of their property investments, more pessimistic homebuyers reduce their leverage to purchase smaller houses. On the other hand, when considerations such as family size pin down the desired property size, pessimistic homebuyers reduce their financial exposure to the housing market by making smaller downpayments to buy similarly-sized homes. To determine which scenario better describes the data, we investigate the cross-sectional relationship between house price beliefs and mortgage leverage choices in the U.S. housing market. We use plausibly exogenous variation in house price beliefs to show that more pessimistic homebuyers make smaller downpayments and choose higher leverage, in particular in states where default costs are relatively low, as well as during periods when house prices are expected to fall on average. Our results highlight the important role of heterogeneous beliefs in explaining households’ financial decisions.

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibrium model of housing. The model has two key elements not previously considered in existing quantitative macro studies of housing finance: aggregate business cycle risk and a realistic wealth distribution driven in the model by bequest heterogeneity in preferences. These features of the model play a crucial role in the following results. First, a relaxation of financing constraints leads to a large boomin house prices. Second, the boom in house prices is entirely the result of a decline in the housing risk premium. Third, low interest rates cannot explain high home values.

In the late 20th century, homeownership became entrenched in a wider societal project that sought to transform the economy and increase social inclusion. This project focused on mortgaged owner-occupation as a means not only to acquire a stable home, but also to realise greater economic security via asset accumulation. The underlying ideology featured an implicit promise that homeownership would be widespread, equalising and secure. Despite transformations in market conditions, such narratives have continued to underscore policy approaches and housing marketisation. This article directly confronts this promise. It first unpacks its key tenets before investigating their currency across three classic ‘homeowner societies’: the US, the UK and Australia. Our empirical findings reveal declining access to homeownership, increasing inequalities in concentrations of housing wealth and intensifying house-price volatility undermining asset security. The article contends that the imperative of homeownership that has sustained housing policy since the 1970s may be increasingly considered a ‘false promise’. Our analyses expose contemporary housing market dynamics that instead appear to enhance inequality and insecurity. 在20世纪后期，房屋所有权在一个更广泛的社会项目中变得根深蒂固，这个项目寻求经济转型和提升社会包容度。该项目强调抵押房主自住，这不仅作为获得稳定住房的一种手段，也作为通过资产积累提升经济安全的一种手段。这其中潜在的意识形态所强调的是这样一个期许：房屋所有权将是广泛的、平等的和安全的。尽管市场环境发生了变化，但这种论述继续强调政策方法和住房市场化。本文直接质疑这个期许。在对这些主要信条在美国、英国和澳大利亚这三个典型的“房主社会”的现实体现进行调查之前，我们首先对这些信条进行了解析。我们的经验研究结果显示，获得住房所有权的机会在减少，住房财富集中的不平等在加剧，而破坏资产安全的房价波动则在加剧。本文认为，自20世纪70年代以来一直作为住房政策基石的房屋所有权必要性理论可能会越来越被视为一种“错误的期许”。我们的分析揭示了当代住房市场的动态，而这种动态似乎加剧了不平等和不安全。

This paper develops first measures of housing sentiment for 34 cities across the United States by quantifying the qualitative tone of local housing news. Housing media sentiment has significant predictive power for future house prices, leading prices by nearly two years. Consistent with theories of investor sentiment, the media sentiment index has a greater effect in markets in which speculative investors are more prevalent and demand appears less informed. Directly examining the content across news articles finds that results are not driven by news stories of unobserved fundamentals.

At the onset of the recent global financial crisis, the workhorse macroeconomic models assumed frictionless financial markets. These frameworks were thus not able to anticipate the crisis, nor to analyze how the disruption of credit markets changed what initially appeared like a mild downturn into the Great Recession. Since that time, an explosion of both theoretical and empirical research has investigated how the financial crisis emerged and how it was transmitted to the real sector. The goal of this paper is to describe what we have learned from this new research and how it can be used to understand what happened during the Great Recession. In the process, we also present some new empirical work. We argue that a complete description of the Great Recession must take account of the financial distress facing both households and banks and, as the crisis unfolded, nonfinancial firms as well. Exploiting both panel data and time series methods, we analyze the contribution of the house price decline, versus the banking distress indicator, to the overall decline in employment during the Great Recession. We confirm a common finding in the literature that the household balance sheet channel is important for regional variation in employment. However, we also find that the disruption in banking was central to the overall employment contraction.

We seek to determine the causes and magnitudes of network externalities for the automated clearing house (ACH) electronic payments system. We construct an equilibrium model of customer and bank adoption of ACH. We structurally estimate the parameters of the model using an indirect inference procedure and panel data. The parameters are identified from exogenous variation in the adoption decisions of banks based outside the network and other factors. We find that most of the impediment to ACH adoption is from large customer fixed costs of adoption. Policies to provide moderate subsidies to customers and larger subsidies to banks for ACH adoption could increase welfare significantly.

An exogenous expansion in mortgage credit has significant effects on house prices. This finding is established using US branching deregulations between 1994 and 2005 as instruments for credit. Credit increases for deregulated banks, but not in placebo samples. Such differential responses rule out demand-based explanations, and identify an exogenous credit supply shock. Because of geographic diversification, treated banks expand credit: housing demand increases, house prices rise, but to a lesser extent in areas with elastic housing supply, where the housing stock increases instead. In an instrumental variable sense, house prices are well explained by the credit expansion induced by deregulation.